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113th ACNW Meeting U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, October 12, 1999

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
ADVISORY COMMITTE ON NUCLEAR WASTE
***

MEETING: 113TH ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON NUCLEAR WASTE

Alexis Park Hotel
375 East Harmon Avenue
Las Vegas, NV

Tuesday, October 12, 1999

The committee met, prusuant to notice, at 8:30 a.m.

MEMBERS PRESENT:
JOHN GARRICK, Chairman, ACNW
GEORGE HORNBERGER, Member, ACNW
RAY WYMER, Member, ACNW
. P R O C E E D I N G S
[8:30 a.m.]
DR. GARRICK: Good morning. We want to welcome you to the
Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste's first day of its 113th meeting.
The entire portion of today's meeting and this evening's meeting will be
open to the public. Today's meeting will take place in the form of a
round table discussion on the subject of the role and use of safety
assessment in the Yucca Mountain regulatory process.
My name is John Garrick, Chairman of the ACNW. Other
members of the committee include George Hornberger, Ray Wymer, and we
have a consultant with us today, Milt Levenson. The subject of today's
meeting is safety assessment. We're using this term interchangeably
with terms risk assessment, total assistant performance, et cetera.
This is appropriate because we are at a time of transitioning from a
safety regulatory process, if you wish, to a risk informed regulatory
process. So, we will be using the words basically to mean the same
thing.
When we ask ourselves what do we mean by risk assessment and
how we answer the question of what is the risk, we really, in the
interest of using plain English, are asking three questions. Those
questions are what can go wrong, how likely is it, and what are the
consequences. The reason we're doing safety assessment, risk
assessment, and the reason we want to understand it, and the reason we
want to be able to communicate the risk assessment is that there has to
be a decision made. So, the emphasis here is on decision making.
I recently read a paper in Physics Today that I thought said
it quite well. The observation was made that the key to effective
decision making for any environmental problem lies in improving the
decision environment itself with the goal of making good decisions
rather than making good predictions. Well, I think we'd like to do
both. I think we'd like to do good analysis and increase our confidence
in the ability as citizens to put on our citizen hat and participate in
the decision making process.
Today we have asked our participants to be brief in their
remarks and communicate what they have to say in plain, understandable
English. This was a message that came through to us very clear a year
ago. Our emphasis is on communication -- communication on how risks are
evaluate; how uncertainties are determined, handled; how results can be
communicated effectively; how the public can get more involved in the
assessment process. This is not the forum for informing the committee
about the details of DOE's performance assessment program. We have many
questions about that, and we will cover those questions in later
meetings.
Based on what we heard from people in the Amargossa Valley
community last year, we agreed we needed to be more creative in our
public outreach, and to do a better job of gaining public participation.
That is why we're here, and we're experimenting with a little different
approach, hoping that it enhances the whole participatory process. I
indicated earlier that the reason we're doing safety assessment and want
to understand it is that a decision has to be made. We consider the
public to be our ultimate customer and the ultimate final decision maker
in the disposition of the nation's commercial nuclear waste.
Also as a result of last year's meeting, we have made a
commitment in our action plan; that is to say, the Advisory Committee on
Nuclear Waste has made a commitment to seek better ways for the public
to get involved and to help the NRC gain greater public confidence and
respect. We look forward to hearing your suggestions on how you would
like to participate and how we can carry out our role more effectively.
I will close by saying we are here more to listen and learn
today than to preach and talk. Now, in order to further enhance our
attempt here at doing this thing right, we have acquired the services of
a facilitator, who's going to handle the facilitation part of our
meeting so that the committee members can focus on trying to capture as
much of what we're hearing as possible. That's Chip Cameron. Chip will
be followed in his remarks as to how we're going to conduct ourselves
today, with comments from Lynn Deering of the ACNW staff, who's worked
extremely hard to put this working group session together today and the
public forum meeting tonight. Chip?
MR. CAMERON: Thanks a lot, Dr. Garrick. My name is Chip
Cameron. I'm the special counsel for public liaison at the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, and I'd like to add my welcome to all of you to
that of Dr. Garrick's and also would like to thank Dr. Garrick and the
advisory committee for the opportunity to serve as your facilitator
today.
As Dr. Garrick already alluded to and as you can see, this
is going to be a different format from the usual advisory committee
meeting. We have representatives of a broad spectrum of interests
affected by the repository around the table with the advisory committee
members, and in a minute, we'll go around and do some introductions. We
have citizen groups, state, local government, federal agencies here at
the table. In case you're wondering, we had these tables made specially
for this event, but as Dr. Garrick also mentioned, the presentations by
people today are not to provide a detailed explanation of the topic but
rather to set the context for a discussion among all of you at the
table. The advisory committee members, Dr. Garrick, Dr. Wymer, Dr.
Hornberger, are here with you around the table, and they want to listen
to the discussion and ask questions about your concerns and
perspectives.
My role as a facilitator will be to provide the advisory
committee members with an opportunity perhaps to relax and give their
full attention to the discussion. I'll also try to keep us relevant and
focused and on schedule, make sure everybody has a chance to speak, and
to keep track of various action items or recommendations that might come
up from the discussions today that the advisory committee may want to
consider.
The ground rules for the discussion are fairly simple. You
all have a name tent in front of you. Some are rustic and some are
fancy, but when we have the presentation by the particular speaker,
we'll go to the table for discussion. If you want to speak, if you
could just put your name tent up like that, that way I'll be able to
keep track of who wants to speak. You won't have to keep your hand in
the air. We'll go around and we'll take the cards. I see Abe is
practicing, and he's done it successfully, much to Judy's amazement I
might add.
I'll go around and when I call on you, if you could just
give your name and affiliation. As we get into it, I think the name
might be okay, but we have a stenographer here who's going to be taking
a transcript, so giving your name will allow us to keep a clean
transcript. I would ask that only one person speak at a time so that we
can not only listen to what everybody has to say but that it will be a
clean transcript. In a minute, I'm going to ask some other people who
have been waiting to come up to the table.
Now, there's a lot of items on the agenda, as you can see,
and they're complicated topics. To just repeat Dr. Garrick's
admonition, please try to be as brief, as concise in your comments,
especially the presenters, as possible. I know that it's hard to
simplify some of these presentations, and I would just thank you in
advance for attempting to do that for us. Now, the focus of the
discussion is going to be here at the table, but we do want to go to the
audience for questions and comments throughout the day, so all of you
out there will get a chance to comment on these particular issues.
What I'd like to do now is go around the table, do some
introductions, and then come back to Lynn Deering, who's going to do an
agenda overview. Then I just want to see if there's any comments on the
agenda from your point of view. I guess Abby, do you want to come up?
Okay, let's do some introductions, your name and affiliation and if you
have one sentence or a concern or interest that you want to express at
this time, why don't you do that. Dr. Garrick, why don't we start with
you again?
DR. GARRICK: My name is John Garrick. I'm a member of the
Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste, and my primary interest is to
achieve our goal of enhancing public involvement in the process.
MR. CAMERON: Milt, go ahead.
MR. LEVENSON: I'm Milt Levenson. I'm a consultant to the
ACNW.
MR. CAMERON: Ray?
MR. CLARK: Ray Clark with EPA. My main concern is the
uniform that those of you who are not familiar with me might not know,
I'm the public health service, which is not part of the Department of
Defense. So, the Navy is not involved in writing the standards for the
waste.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks for that clarification, Ray. Paul?
MR. DAVIS: I'm Paul Davis of Sandia National Laboratories.
MR. BECHTEL: I am not Fred Dilger, but I'm Dennis Bechtel
with Clark County, Nevada.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Dennis.
MR. HORNBERGER: I'm George Hornberger. I'm a professor of
environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, and I'm a member
of the ACNW.
MR. REAMER: I'm Bill Reamer. I'm a member of the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission's staff. I want to thank Dr. Garrick and the ACNW
for having this workshop on involving the public in risk assessment and
risk communication, and I'm looking forward to participating in this
today.
MR. McCONNELL: I'm Keith McConnell. I'm also with the NRC
staff.
MR. MURPHY: Mal Murphy. I'm the regulatory and licensing
advisor to the Niconi Nuclear Waste Repository Project Office.
MR. VAN LUICK: Dave Van Luick with the Department of
Energy. I'm the policy advisor on performance assessment to the project
manager.
MR. TREICHEL: Judy Treichel, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task
Force. We're a public advocacy group that's totally supported by
donations from the public.
MR. FRISHMAN: I'm Steve Frishman with the State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects, and you'll hear plenty of lines from me
later.
MR. WYMER: I'm Ray Wymer, member of the ACNW.
MR. VASCONI: Bill Vasconi, Nevada president affiliated with
the CETI committee, which is a citizens organization, Nevada citizens
organization believing that a thorough and scientific study ought to
come out that is essential to insure the health and safety and
environmental concerns of the people of Nevada and the nation. Also,
that the importance of the scientific studies provides a unique
opportunity for Nevada to negotiate for equity benefits.
MR. PHILLIPS: I'm Bill Phillips. I'm an old-time Nevada
resident. I was born and raised here. I'm 50 years old now. My
parents immigrated here back in the 1800's, my grandparents, great-
grandparents. My mother and father moved here in 1931 along with their
parents and worked on Hoover Dam. I was educated here in the state of
Nevada. I got a master's degree in physics, another master's degree in
radiological sciences at the University of Washington. I'm a
comprehensively certified health physicist for the American Board of
Health Physics. I spent 25 years with the EPA, and I'm not retired.
So, I'm here representing my family, our interests, and as a CHP, and as
an old-time Nevadan.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Bill.
MR. ANDREWS: I'm Bob Andrews with the management and
operating contractor supporting the Department of Energy. I manage the
performance assessment work and also want to congratulate the ACNW for
having this meeting as we try to learn how to better communicate all of
those complex curves, and we'll learn from this presentation and
discussion as well, I'm sure.
MS. JOHNSON: I'm Abby Johnson. I'm the nuclear waste
advisor for Eureka County, Nevada.
MS. DEERING: Good morning. I'm Lynn Deering. I'm an ACNW
staff member.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, great. Thanks, Lynn. Why don't you go
right to the agenda and give us a rundown on that and then we'll come
back to the other people at the table.
MS. DEERING: Okay. I first wanted to thank everybody at
this table for their willingness to try something different and work
with this alternative format, the round table style. Thank you very
much for your willingness, and somewhat experimental. I also wanted to
thank a few people especially for their ideas as this meeting took
shape. I just want to mention them by name in particular: Abby
Johnson, Steve Frishman, Paul Davis for the idea of the round table
itself, Carol Hanlon and Chip Cameron, our facilitator.
Steve Frishman is going to be our lead speaker, and he's
just going to give us a brief overview about what he will be saying a
little bit later in the day so that we can benefit from his comments and
concerns early and throughout our discussions so that we don't wait
until the end of the day to hear what he has to say.
Next, Ray Clark of EPA will summarize for us the highlights
of the proposed EPA high level waste standard and give a little bit
about the philosophy and basis for that standard as to how it's
protective of public health and the environment. We hope to hear a
little bit about the role of the public in shaping that standard. It
seems fundamentally, if the standard itself is so important in the
safety assessment process, if we can't achieve buy-in on that, then it's
unlikely we will get buy-in in the process itself later on down the
road.
After break, Bill Reamer will describe the NRC's licensing
process and talk a bit about how the NRC uses safety assessment in its
decision making process, hopefully a little bit about how the public
participates in NRC's licensing process. There are some issues that
perhaps in the discussion that might come out. For example, does the
regulator need absolute certainty to make a decision and if not, how
does the regulator decide. Also, does the NRC anticipate requiring
information beyond DOE's total system performance assessment to make a
decision, and if so, what kind of information might that be.
Following Bill will be Paul Davis of Sandia Labs. He's
going to talk about the role of uncertainty in safety assessment, issues
such as how do we arrive at competence in the result of performance
assessment and how should uncertainty be communicated; possibly even get
into what does the performance assessment result actually mean? Is it
supposed to be a conservative estimate? Is it a mean? What is it?
What do we do with it?
Following lunch, Abe Van Luik and Bob Andrews of DOE are
going to talk a little bit about how they decide in the total system
performance assessment what is most important, what are the key
uncertainties presently that are driving that analysis, and how are they
going to make their results and their analysis clear and transparent so
that the public and everybody else can see how each assumption impacts
the final result and how the various components work together. One
possible issue in discussion could be is there a greater role for the
public in the total system performance assessment process than is
currently happening and if so, what might that look like.
Transportation is the next topic. Some of our people from
the counties will talk about their concerns with transportation risk and
how it relates to safety assessment. Then we'll have a break, and Mr.
Frishman will talk to us about why people don't trust risk assessments.
This is a really important topic to us. Even if the best science is
used and the best data and the best methods, is there still something
missing, and is performance assessment or safety assessment the best
tool to evaluate safety of a repository, and if not, what else do we
have?
Finally, George Stiles of the MNO will share with us some of
his insights about the waste isolation pilot project site and public
involvement. How do we involve the public in that, and some lessons
learned that we might all benefit from.
John Garrick will be our last speaker. He will describe
ACNW's role in this whole process, how ACNW decides what to focus on,
and the role of the public in the ACNW's process. Then there will be a
wrap-up with the audience and the participants up here. We'll break for
dinner and then we'll have a public meeting starting at 7:00 this
evening. Thank you.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Lynn. We may be joined from
time to time by others at the table, so depending on the particular
topic, and we will be going out right before lunch to get some public
comment before we break for lunch. Questions around the table on
agenda, Mal?
MR. MURPHY: Not a question. I just wanted to reconfirm
that during the afternoon session on transportation risk, Jim Williams
will be replacing me at the table. Jim is Niconi's transportation
expert and is much more informed on that subject and would be able to
participate much more knowledgeably in that discussion. I'll be here
the rest of the day and Jim will do transportation. Is this microphone
on?
MR. CAMERON: Yeah, I think it is. Are we having any
trouble around the table in hearing? I guess I would just ask you to
speak as much into the microphone as you can.
REPORTER: Chip, you project very well. Other people speak
very low. So, if they could just speak out a little louder. This man
is trying to increase the volume.
MR. CAMERON: All right, thanks, Carey. If we could follow
Carey's instructions on that, I think that that would be helpful. Any
other comments or questions on the agenda?
All right. We asked Steve Frishman to do something that
he's not really used to doing, which is to be provocative for us, and
he's going to sort of give us some thoughts to think about for the rest
of the day. So, let's bring Steve up. Steve?
MR. FRISHMAN: Well, I guess what I have to start out with
in line with what John was saying is first of all, what's the risk that
the table won't be round. The unfortunate consequence is that 50
percent of the table at all times have our back to somebody, but I think
we'll try to overcome that.
What I wanted to this morning, just to start things off was
show you four viewgraphs, and you know it's uncharacteristic of me to
use viewgraphs, so I promise they're not mine -- use four viewgraphs and
just put them up one at a time, let you look at them, and then when I
get to the last one, have just maybe a thought or two that should set
the stage for the rest of today. All right, Chip.
We're already setting the stage. Lawyers are good for
something. These will all be very familiar to you, and I won't even
talk about them until we get to the end. You've seen all of these many,
many times. This one isn't from DOE, but it is from a recent
publication.
SPEAKER: Is that roughly the way the water flows?
MR. FRISHMAN: That's roughly what is expected to be the way
the water flows.
MR. CAMERON: Just to keep in mind, we need to get all these
questions if we're going to have any, on the transcript.
MR. FRISHMAN: All right now, this is essentially the way
the department says a Yucca Mountain repository would work. We're all
very used to it. I think we understand it fairly well, and we see the
ultimate dose recipient, and we see that everything in that dose
recipient's life would involve radiation exposure of some kind. Now, we
look at this and understand, and we can talk easily about pathways. We
can talk easily about groundwater flow directions.
Now, the big question and the one that needs to linger all
day today is if I went out in the hall and took someone from the jewelry
convention, show them that same sequence, would they see it the same way
we do. I think the answer is obviously no, and I've had a lot of
practice with these viewgraphs, and I have personal experience that the
answer is no. This picture scares the hell out of people because they
understand that a repository at Yucca Mountain does not contain waste,
and they understand that people are the ultimate recipients of the
waste.
We all work almost cavalierly all day, every day with a
certain knowledge that the repository will release the waste. Some of
us have better knowledge of where it might go than others, but it all
goes to the biosphere eventually. People have been led to believe
through time that geologic isolation means isolation. In 1990, the
National Academy of Sciences Board on Radioactive Waste Management came
to the astounding realization that people's expectations of the safety
of a repository are too high. Well, this confirms that people's
expectations might be too high. People don't realize what a Yucca
Mountain repository would do.
We can talk about levels of containment. We can talk about
uncertainty. We can talk about the new theory of a geological
repository that emerged to me very clearly in what you will hear from
Ray in the next presentation, and that's that the objective is no longer
to isolate. It's to delay releases. That makes people even more scared
when they look at a picture like this. It's just a question of when,
and then the uncertainty comes in. Someone says it will be 10,000
years. Someone else says it will be 70,000 years, but we also have the
very real possibility that from the outset, much of it won't work the
way it was predicted to work.
So, that's just something to sort of keep in mind throughout
the rest of today. Does the general public see things the same way we
do when it comes to risk assessments and risk decisions, and I think the
answer very often is pretty clearly no.
Now, I'm not sure how many of you have followed the lore and
literature of the nuclear business for a long time, but I found a
statement in a book that I was reading the other day, and I don't even
know exactly when it was made. I think it was sometime in the late
50's, but I think it's really appropo when we're talking about risk
assessments and we're talking about risk decisions, and we're talking
about involving the public in that process.
There was a general atmosphere and attitude that the
American people could not be trusted with the uncertainties, and
therefore the information was withheld from them. I think that there
was concern that the American people, given the facts, would not make
the right risk benefit judgments. This was on the front page of a book
about one of the attempts at plow shares, one that didn't go at Project
Charriot. I think that we're not very far still from the truth of that
statement. That may be provocative enough to get the rest of the day
going.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you very much, Steve. I put a
couple of Steve's point up there -- public perception of risk and role
of risk communication, which I think was brought out by his last slide.
Steve said some things that were provocative, and I know there's people
around the table who may have different opinions on some of the comments
that he made. I hope that we would bring those out during the
discussion today.
What I'd like to do now is give one additional member of our
panel the chance to introduce themselves and then we'll go to Ray Clark
to talk about the EPA standard. Robert?
MR. HOLDEN: Good morning. I'm Robert Holden with the
National Congress of American Indians. There was meeting in the area,
and we had our largest convention of tribal governments in recent
history where 150 tribal governments sat and talked about different
issues impacting health, education, natural resources impacts and health
impacts and cultural impacts of federal programs and other issues. I'm
here just to monitor what has been happening with the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission and its oversight activities.
I guess one of the things I just want to say briefly is that
the NRC, as much as it's trying to include American Indian input into
the process throughout the last few years as I've been acquainted with
this program and the different programs in my work as a nuclear waste
program director for the NCAI, there appears to be this selective
sovereignty in terms of what the agency does, as does other agencies in
terms of acknowledging tribal treaty rights, acknowledging indigenous
human rights, acknowledging those lands that these activities are taking
place.
There are two types of land in our mind. There's 80 in the
country which has a designated definition, a statutory definition, and
there's former Indian country, which all of this is, basically. Along
with these treaties, along with these areas, come with it the
responsibility for NRC and other agencies to respond to the needs of
these tribal governments that are still in place, to interact with them,
to apprise them, and actually it should go further than that because
what happens is that even though they may be apprised, it really doesn't
necessarily have to -- it doesn't necessarily assume that the
responsibility that is incumbent upon any agency through these treaties
and so forth, that it's exercise. It's delivered, which would in effect
provide a little more outreach, provide a little more -- few more
resources to provide these tribes with the wherewithal to respond to
these types of meetings and attend these meetings.
I see a few folks here that are from the area, and it's good
to see them here, but I'm not sure whether, you know, the tribal leaders
have the program folks that would be able to deal with the technical
issues. I hope to add something to this, and as I said, just here to
monitor and get an overview of some of these things that are taking
place. I appreciate being here. I appreciate the invitation.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks a lot, Robert. I'm just going to
make a note up here that a risk communication and involvement issue that
some folks face is resources -- resources for participation. I'd also
like to note that we have Ian Zabarte from the Western Shoshoni National
Council with us today, and I hope that we have the benefit of hearing
from Ian during the session today.
Ray, are you ready to tell us about the EPA standard?
MR. CLARK: Sure.
MR. CAMERON: All right. And your viewgraphs self-destruct
after a certain number, but I'm not sure. Lynn knows what number it is,
but I don't.
MR. CLARK: I thing we pretty well know what the subject is
on this, but I'll throw this up just for a formal introduction. I will
be quick with this. I explained that the uniform is not Department of
Defense. I didn't explain what it is. We're under the Department of
Health and Human Services. We are one of the uniformed services of the
United States, but we're not defense related whatsoever.
MR. CAMERON: At least you're not wearing a tie.
MR. CLARK: That's the main thing. Just a very quick
background. The Energy Policy Act in 1992 gave EPA the authority to set
site specific standards for Yucca Mountain. I realize there are
acronyms all through this. Hopefully that won't be distracting. If it
is, please ask me to explain.
We're also required to contract with the National Academy of
Sciences for technical input into the standards, and the NRC is required
to issue their licensing regulations or to be consistent in their
licensing regulations with the EPA standards. We did finally propose
the standards on August 27.
Just very quickly, an outline. There's two subparts. You
can see one, subpart A, is for storage. Subpart B is for disposal.
I'll run through each of these very quickly, but you can see there's
individual -- well, the storage part is an operational standard. The
disposal part is more of a design standard in that you depend on
projected performance more than you would monitoring generally, thinking
anyway. I have individual protection standards, human intrusion,
groundwater protection, and then a couple of other considerations.
The storage standard which I say is operational, meaning
that it will be enforced with actual monitory, or at least I would
anticipate it to be enforced with actual monitoring and the projections,
similar to any other operating nuclear facility. Of course, that's up
to the Commission how they do it. That's what I would anticipate.
It's 150 microsieverts, which is 150 millirems per year. It
will include doses from both inside the repository and from operations
outside the repository. I won't get into the details of that. It is
consistent with Part 191. Part 191 is our generic standards for spent
fuel and high level waste which were originally issued in 1985. The
reference to this risk level is one in a million to one in 100,000 for
fatal cancers. This is the dose range, or risk range I should say, that
was suggested by the NAS, albeit they addressed disposal, not storage,
but it all comes out to the same kind of risk from radiation.
Getting quickly into the disposal standards, again we're at
150, and I apologize for the terminology, but microsieverts, committed
effective dose through all pathways over 10,000 years. That means there
can be no projected annual dose higher than that within the first 10,000
years after disposal. That would be to the reasonably maximum exposed
individual who is an individual who is -- I won't way is. The concept
of the reasonably maximum exposed individual is a person who is in the
most highly exposed group of people. We think it's similar to the
critical group concept which was suggested by the NAS. This person --
projected dose -- I'm struggling for the right words here. The
projected dose accurate -- not accurately, excuse me, to project dose
reasonably, meaning that some of the dose factors that are considered,
some of the parameters, you use the highest values for those, but a
number of the factors can stay at an average or median value.
The two that we have specified in our standards is the
location being near Lathrop Wells intersection, and we have a map later,
although I suspect most of the people here know generally where that is,
and the person would drink two liters per day of ground water.
Groundwater protection standards, we proposed to be the
maximum of contaminant levels which are applicable everywhere else in
the country for various projects. These are developed under the Safe
Drinking Water Act, and they're listed there. I won't go into them for
time purposes.
In your handouts, you'll see this chart which gives you four
possible ways that we could set the point of compliance. Now, the
intent here is after the public comment period to choose one of these,
not to just leave all four of them open for further choice. To try to
explain this a little better, this was that extra map that got -- it's
on the back table if you didn't get one. We have two alternatives which
are what we call controlled areas. That's a term that we first used in
the generic standards as Part 191.
The first alternative that we've proposed is this thinner
line on your handout. Now, granted that's a conceptual line that the
department had been using under the generic standards before the new
standards were proposed. That's what we generally refer to as a five
kilometer approach.
The second controlled area is kind of a combination of the
five kilometers in the Nevada test site boundary, and that's this
thicker line on your handouts. It's five kilometers, and obviously this
is my hand rendering on a computer graphics with a mouse and so don't
hold anybody to this line. Roughly five kilometers from the footprint
here except where it intersects the Nevada test site boundary, so you'd
have a controlled area which looks something like this, with that
alternative.
The other two alternatives are designated points. The
roughly 20 kilometers here at the Lathrop Wells intersection which I
referred to before. The third would be somewhere in this area, and
again, this is just estimation of where this box falls, but somewhere in
this point, roughly 30 kilometers from the footprint. That's intended
to be where the majority of the farming takes place in the southern
Amargossa Valley.
This I'll just be real quick. For individual protection,
we've also proposed that if the peak dose occurs
-- well, I'm sorry. You must meet the peak dose limit within the first
10,000 years. You then need to calculate out whatever the peak dose is
after 10,000 years, but you don't have to include that in the license
application. It does need to be put in the Yucca Mountain EIS for
decision makers purposes and for public information.
This limit on performance assessment consideration is again
a carry-over from our generic standards. You don't need to consider
processes and events with a probability. Well now, I said that
backwards from what this slide says. You need only consider processes
and events for the probability of occurrence of one in 10,000 within
10,000 years is what that means.
For a very quick background that Lynn said I was supposed to
talk about, I promised that I would save some of the philosophy behind.
Again, Part 191, the generic standards, the waste isolation pilot
plant certification and other chemically hazardous waste programs.
Another concept which gets a lot of discussion is the
reasonable expectation. I was throwing out those numbers, like 150
millirem, which are intended to be concrete numbers, but to reasonably
project doses over 10,000 years is obviously very difficult to do with
absolute certainty. In fact, I think one could safely say it's
impossible to do. So we, in 191 and again continuing here, have used
the concept of reasonable expectation. Those take into account these
greater uncertainties. It's intended to be reasonable in the sense that
it's less stringent than reasonable assurance that's used, for example,
for reactor systems which are totally engineered systems and for which
there are -- I don't know
-- thousands of hours of experience.
I would require that all the important parameters and
processes be considered even if they're not precisely quantifiable. In
other words, if something helps with the performance or something hurts
the performance, either way, you should consider it within reasonable
bounds -- cautious but reasonable. I think we could use that term, as
the NAS has said. The compliance determination, we believe, should not
be heavily influenced by worst case assumptions. In other words, use a
full range of reasonable values for various parameters rather than just
extremes one way or the other for whatever purpose that would be done.
Finally, Lynn mentioned something about public involvement.
Somehow I realized with horror that I hadn't used my updated slide for
this one, but that's easy to fix. We do have public hearings this
month. One is the 13th in Washington, which does indeed mean I will
miss it, but we wanted to be here because we said we'd be here. We
wanted to know that this is an important function for us.
The next one is Amargossa Valley on the 19th here in Las
Vegas the 20th, 21st, and this is what didn't get updated,
unfortunately. Without looking at a calendar, I believe it's the 27th
in Kansas City, Missouri. The comment parade is open until November 26.
We will then do a response to comments document, final technical
background documents, and the target for final is August, 2000.
We also have a web site where people can get information on
this project. We have an 800 number, which I shouldn't say because I
don't know it right off the top of my head, but I can get it for you.
It should be in the EIS -- excuse me, the Federal Register notices which
were on the table as well.
With that, I think I'll turn it over to Chip.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you very much, Ray. As we all know, we
could spend a day discussing this and indeed, there are going to be
public meetings, as Ray noted, on this issue. What we'd like to do is
make sure that you identify any concerns or perspectives that you have
for the advisory committee so that they can factor that into their
analysis and evaluation. I'm going to go to Steve Frishman first on
this and then go over to Bill Phillips. Steve?
MR. FRISHMAN: I think while I had control of the
microphone, I took a pretty serious shot at this rule proposal. We
probably ought to go into that a little bit.
First, what I said was in this rule proposal, we have a new
concept introduced into geologic repository thinking. I say that
because I found it both in the proposed rule and the definition of
barrier and in the definition of disposal. The definition of disposal,
I think, is the most telling. Disposal means emplacement of radioactive
material into the Yucca Mountain disposal system with the intent of
isolating it for as long as reasonably possible. Now, this is not the
geologic isolation we have been talking about for a long time. If you
look at barrier, it goes through a reasonable definition of barrier,
which is essentially prevents or substantially reduces the rate of
movement or rate of release, but then it gives an example. For example,
a barrier may be a geologic feature, engineering structure, canister, so
on, that significantly decrease the mobility of radionuclides or
material placed over and around the waste, provided that the material
substantially delays movement of water or radionuclides.
Well, this is a whole new idea, and I think it's very
important in the context of what we're talking about today. Are we
making a risk assessment on the likelihood that the waste will be
isolated, or on the likelihood that release will be delayed? That's why
I point this up as an entirely new concept in the system. Ray, am I
being unfair?
MR. CLARK: In one way, yes, to call that a whole new
concept. This is the same, or at least generally the same as in Part
191, which I don't have with me to quote, but the barrier concept is the
same.
MR. CAMERON: Let me pose this question to the group. I
want to hear from Bill first, but the question that I would pose to all
of you for the benefit of the advisory committee is do you agree or
disagree with Steve that this represents a whole new concept in geologic
disposal. Bill, why don't you put your comment on the table, and then
we'll come back to this point.
MR. PHILLIPS: I just had a real quick question. I've been
out of the loop for a few years, but you mentioned that on your third
slide when you're looking at 20 to 200 microsieverts caused with risk
assessment or risk possibility of ten to the minus 550 fatalities only. The
International Commission on Radiation Protection many years ago set up
the standards, and when I was working for DOE and EPA, the standards was
one in ten to the minus four per rem, but that was not just a fatality.
That included morbidity and mutations in your first offspring and also
mutations in their offspring for two generations. So, a socially
recognizable deformity in your children or their children was also
considered in that risk assessment. Is that included in this, too, or
has that been dropped?
MR. CLARK: We didn't include it in 191. It was discussed,
but we've always based on fatal cancers, and in this case, this is based
on the NAS suggestion. I can't repeat exactly what their reasoning
process was, but generally, they felt that fatal cancer was more
detrimental to society than the other effects, so they based their
recommendation on fatal cancer.
MR. PHILLIPS: And were these studies that came up with
these numbers based upon the Hiroshima Nagasaki survivors, that
population, too, primarily?
MR. CLARK: I would imagine, but I can't say that for sure.
MR. PHILLIPS: That's all.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. I would just note, I don't know if Bill
put this in his introduction, but besides being a long-time Nevada
resident, he's also a certified health physicist.
Let's go back to the thought that Steve Frishman put on the
table about the EPA standard represents a whole new way of thinking in
geologic disposal. Let's go to Mal and then we'll go to Abe. Mal?
MR. MURPHY: Thanks, Chip. First, Ray, I think you misspoke
yourself a couple of times in your presentation when you equated 150
microsieverts with 150 millirem.
MR. CLARK: Oh, did I say 150?
MR. MURPHY: You meant to say 15.
MR. CLARK: I'm sorry, yes. You're absolutely right.
MR. MURPHY: Steve, I don't agree necessarily that the
definition of disposals represents a departure in waste management
thinking. It seems to me if you look not only at the definitions but at
the whole broad spectrum of the way the regulatory environment has
addressed the Yucca Mountain project over the years, we've always
anticipated that there would be some reasonableness associated with the
disposal.
From our perspective, from the Niconi perspective, it seems
to me, you know, when you say, and this is what I think our public
expects out of the program. When you say that the waste should be
isolated for as long as reasonably possible, to us that means that you
must make every reasonable effort -- every effort possible consistent
with today's available technology and technology which could be -- which
you could reasonably develop in the near future to isolate that waste
efficiently so that the additional burden on the population in Niconi
would be zero. If it's possible to get to zero, then we think that
definition means that you need to get to zero.
So, we would -- I don't think that's necessarily a
departure, but we would read that definition as perhaps requiring a
little more effort at, for want of a better description, 100 percent
isolation than some other participants in the project would.
Let me just make another point that I'm sure we'll be
hashing out for the rest of the day, and that is the way that the EPA
and the way that Ray expressed the risk standard. You know, I don't
blame the EPA for this. I think the entire technical community has done
this throughout the history of nuclear materials, I guess. In my
experience, many member of the public -- not all but many members of the
public do not understand it when we express these risks in terms of
probability. If you say that EPA's acceptable risk is one times ten to
the minus six, or one in a million, many people assume that to mean that
one out of a million people will prematurely die of cancer and that if -
- I don't remember what the exact figure is, but if the population of
the United States, and let's assume the U.S. is the whole world, if the
population of the United States today is 220 million, then some people
assume that to mean that it is the policy of the United States
government to accept 220 fatalities in their lifetime, in their
generation, to accept 220 fatalities as an acceptable risk.
Now, we all here know that that's not what that means, but I
don't think over the history of nuclear activities, since the atom was
first split, that that has as frequently as necessary, we've been
clearly communicated to the public -- anywhere in the world, really, I
would assume. That is not what the risk standard is, but I think a lot
of people still misunderstand that significantly, and that colors the
whole broad spectrum of thinking about what is and is not acceptable
risk and how government or utilities, state and local governments,
everybody involved, approaches the idea of protecting the public health
and safety.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Mal. We really are perhaps
discussing two risk communication issues here. Going back to a couple
of Steve's points, and we want to go to Abe and Bill Vasconi on this
idea of what does isolation mean and what's the public's perspective on
isolation. Mal brought up another one that we may want to explore,
about how best to express this risk in terms of public communication.
Abe, go ahead.
MR. VAN LUIK: Two points. The ICRP, that's the
International Committee on Radiation Protection, in its rewrite of Part
46, which is specific to disposal, I just happened to be in a meeting
where some of the principals were discussing the definition section, and
they said that we have to make a very strong point that geologic
disposal is not permanent but it's an extremely slow release. In the
past, I think, we have sort of misled the public because we knew we were
talking about releases over geologic times, but the public doesn't have
that concept well in place. So, I think there is a little bit of
culpability on selling this thing back in the 70's as being something
that's more than it really is, but I think as far as the standards, the
international standards, et cetera, they have always assumed that you
have to protect against the inevitable very slow release of materials
from these systems.
Another point on ten to the minus six, you know, we all
breathe a sigh of relief and say that's not very important. My mother's
82 years old. She detests gambling, even though she lives here in Las
Vegas. Every weekend, I drive her to California so she can buy the
Lotto tickets. I say Ma, that's a one in 140 million chance, and she
says somebody's got to win. I try to explain to her what I do for a
living and the projections that we make, and she says you guys don't
know what you're talking about. See, it's almost impossible to explain
to some people who even like you that there's merit in what you're
doing. So, I'm here to listen.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks a lot, Abe. Let's go to Bill
Vasconi.
MR. VASCONI: Yes, I'm not as learned as a lot of people at
the table, so I just interject things. I do have two ears and one
mouth, and I fully intended to -- I felt that I should listen twice as
hard as I talk.
Isolation and risk. Well, we keep talking on the 10,000
years, but you know, common sense tells me we are building this, as Mal
said, with today's technology, today's knowledge, today's alloys. They
do talk about transmutation, perhaps in 25 or 30 years. Well, I give
our educational system a lot more credit. What we've done in the last
hundred years, I'm sure within the next two or 300 years, perhaps the
repository should be looked at as a stewardship. You know, 10,000
years, and we're talking about what kind of assessment we'll have then.
I doubt very seriously if there will be any coal reserves, oil reserves
left in the world in 10,000 years. I can view what's happening at Yucca
Mountain and possibly some other locations in the world as a definite
reserves on natural resources.
Yes, we do have health and safety concerns. Yes, we do have
environmental concerns, and they're all risk. Here a couple of years
ago, a politician did bring out some startling statistics running for
office. If you live in Las Vegas, there's a murder every two days.
There's a rape every nine hours, and there's a car stolen every 40
minutes. There's a lot of risk living in Las Vegas. That's all I have
to say.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Bill, and I think that we're
going to go to Steve, but I guess the point Bill raises is what should
be included in the communication of risk. Whose responsibility, how are
benefits, at least perceived benefits, supposed to be communicated.
Steve?
MR. FRISHMAN: I guess maybe I have to clarify sort of the
underpinning of my argument, and that's I agree when Abe says we've all
known for a very long time. The reality is what we're really looking
for is very slow release because zero release is, in reality, probably
impossible.
Well, the point that I'm making is that if we talk about
very slow release or, as the primary definition, is substantially
reduces rate of movement. What we're talking about is a rate function.
Very slow is a rate function. Delay is a time function, and they're two
very different things. You can delay, and then you can slow, which is
essentially what we're coming to with the type of package concept we've
got now. That's the distinction I'm making. What's new is we're
talking about only a time function. We're not talking about a rate
function, and it's the rate function that's important in this analysis.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks for that clarification, Steve.
Judy?
MS. TREICHEL: I think one of the things that makes a lot of
difference is whether or not you're taking a voluntary or you're being
forced to take an involuntary risk. Many, many things change. There
are a lot of things that you will do that someone would call risky if
you believe that you're getting a benefit, either monetary or
satisfaction or something, but when it's imposed upon you, it's a whole
different thing. I believe, as has been said here, that people have a
different expectation. When they say that it's worth the risk of having
this waste transported past them to get to Yucca Mountain, it's worth
the 25 to $50 billion to do the project, it's worth all of these things.
They believe if it's worth it, it's because the waste is disposed of,
and they see that as being absolutely gone forever and every.
When Nevadans are faced with a risk for something that's not
really what it appears to be, it seems to me you've got to get an
agreement that people are willing to take that risk, whether it's in
Nevada or along a transportation route. You need to tell them what it
is first and then find out if they'll accept the risk and not just keep
trying to massage the way in which risk is described.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Judy. I think Mal has
-- Mal, do you have a follow up on Judy's?
MR. MURPHY: Just another additional point I want people to
keep in mind. Judy makes an excellent point, you know, where we have to
keep in mind the very vast difference between voluntary and involuntary
risk. Very analogous to that is the fact that for this project, people
have to remember that we are not creating a new risk of exposure to
radiation. We are transferring that risk of others in the country to,
from our perspective, the residents of Nye County. This is not a new
risk that we're generating for the first time, but it's a risk that
we're relieving some people of living with and transferring it to the
people out here in Nevada.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Mal. Perhaps we can go a little
further and explore this whole idea of the acceptability of the risk.
What's the role of risk communication in that particular decision? I
should ask -- we've heard obviously from the EPA and from DOE. I'd like
to see if the advisory committee members have anything to ask or say
about this, but before I do that, Bill Reamer from the NRC, do you have
anything that you want to add to this particular discussion or
perspectives on the EPA standard?
MR. REAMER: Well, Chip, let me just mention three things
because I think they may be on people's minds. One, as people know, we
proposed our proposed regulation for Yucca Mountain last March, and we
do intend to complete our rulemaking on that.
Secondly -- and we expect that will be completed probably
the first quarter of next year. Secondly, as Ray pointed out, the EPA
standard is out for public comment, and we will be filing our public
comments on that within the time frame. When we proposed Part 63, we
set forth at that time our view on what was a scientifically and
technically sound standard for Yucca Mountain. We expect that EPA will
read our comments, when we file our comments, that they will read all
the comments and that they will finalize their standard and issue a
final rule. Ray is saying that will take place in August of 2000.
Under the law, we are required, as Ray pointed out, to be
consistent with the EPA standard so when there is a final EPA standard
that is issued, we will of course carry out our responsibilities.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Bill. For those of you in the
audience, we will go on to you before we close off this session to hear
from you on this since it's a very important foundation issue.
In terms of public acceptance, I wrote a question up there,
what are the underpinnings of public acceptance? What goes into that
equation. Let's go to Abby, and then if the advisory committee members
have anything that they want to put on the table, please put your name
tents up and I'll make sure that gets on. Abby?
MS. JOHNSON: Abby Johnson, Eureka County. The comment I
would like to make is that when you look at risk communication, you also
have to look at the risk communicators. From the Nevada point of view,
we've had a lot of people trying to communicate with us about risk and
what it's going to do to us and what it's not going to do to us, and all
those people have a vested interest in having this project be located in
Nevada. So, when they have that vested interest, you know, we're
sitting around the table saying well, the public doesn't understand.
Well, I think the public does understand, and the public understands
that there's only one answer in this project, and it's getting to yes.
It's never getting to no. So, as long as this project is -- the mission
of this project is to get to yes no matter what, no matter what the
risks are, no matter what the site is like, then risk communication is a
farce.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Abby. I think that from a
process point of view, one thing to put on the table now is that the
advisory committee perhaps has a unique role to play in terms of being a
communicator and that this opportunity that they're providing is to see
if maybe they can use their unique role to do something in this area. I
think that that's why perhaps we're all here, so don't lose sight of
that. Dr. Garrick, did you want to say something?
DR. GARRICK: Well, I would ask if either of the committee
members or our consultant would like to comment. George? Ray?
DR. WYMER: I won't say much that has any real substance to
it. We are here to listen and to carry the message back to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission through our reports that we give to the
commissioners. I don't want to appear to be patronizing, but I'm very
impressed, as I was last year, with the sophistication and subtle
thought that the people have presented. So far, the depth of
understanding of the issues and the problems, you know, it's a little
surprising to find that, but maybe it shouldn't be. So, we are here to
listen, and that's our primary role today. I think I could say with
honesty that we don't have a position with respect to how this thing
ought to go.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Dr. Wymer. Just keep in mind
this issue. I think that we're going to get -- we're going to flirt
around with it all throughout the day but we're going to come back to
that for wrap-up, the unique role of ACNW here. I'm just putting that
up there for you to think about throughout the day. I know that Fred,
a/k/a Dennis Bechtel, over there wants to say something. Go ahead.
MR. BECHTEL: I'd just like to point out, when you talk
about risks, we're actually talking about two time frames, too. We're
talking about long term risk, and obviously health and safety risk is of
primary concern to all of us. Since we're potentially the end of the
funnel for this project, in southern Nevada there are a lot of other
risks, too. There's risk to economy, livelihood, quality of life.
People come to Nevada, southern Nevada, for various reasons and of
course, if you're familiar with the EIS that came out, there's a lot of
options that would transport waste through all of Nevada. A number of
options for southern Nevada we're concerned about, so I think you have
to broaden your thinking about risks. Short term may be more economic.
Long term or maybe not long term health and safety, a range of risks.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Dennis. I think that ties in
with what the issue that Bill Vasconi raised for us earlier, is that
what's included in the risk and do you think put a finer point on that
for us. Let's go to Bill and then go over to Milt from the advisory
committee, the consultant. Go ahead, Bill.
MR. REAMER: Well, my feeling, you know, being a physicist
and a health physicist for the last 30 years of my life is that you
can't really even talk about risk at 15 millirem. You can't talk about
risk at 100 millirem or even 1,000 millirem. Yesterday I had some back
x-rays, and I got 1,000 millirem a shot at my lower back. A cat scan is
8,000 millirem. Dental x-rays are 200 millirem apiece, and the lawyers
and EPA, and I've watched them do it my whole life because I was part of
that process, because you can measure radiation down in annual doses of
a tenth of a millirem per yea. We have national emissions standards on
hazardous air pollutants that regulate at one tenth of a millirem
annually to residents in uncontrolled areas. You know, the national
standard for the MISHAPS is ten millirem per year.
I think it's ludicrous to talk about 150 millirem or 15
millirem a year or 25 millirem a year like the NRC does. You have to
keep in mind that you see no biological effects whatsoever until you get
acute exposures up around to 30 to 40 to 50 millirem, and then you see
lymphocyte drops in the blood. What we're doing here is we're taking --
there's never been an epidemiological study to prove that there's any
risk for radiation workers that are receiving 5,000 millirem per year.
There's no correlation.
I know people who have worked in the radiation refueling
industry their whole lives at 50 years old. I know hundreds of people
and have read hundreds of -- have seen the activities of these people
and the reports and studies of. These guys get burned out on refueling
nuclear power reactors every year. You don't see increased cancer risk
with these people. You know, the body has a tremendous capacity to
repair itself from biological risks from ionizing radiation because we
evolved on this planet where this was a common insult. In fact, the
planet was much more radioactive, you know, hundreds of thousands of
years ago than it is now. You have repair mechanisms.
If I go out in the sun for eight hours, I'll probably die,
but if I do it over a month's period, I'm not going to. I won't even
get burned because there's repair networks going on. So, when you're
talking 15 millirems a year, 25 millirems per year, I think it's
absolutely ludicrous because we can measure so clearly and so
effectively at this level to even try to set risk standards based upon a
linear non-threshold model which is what we're using here. We're saying
that the risk goes all the way to zero. One gamma ray can cause you
cancer if it hits the right DNA molecule.
So, 15 millirem is ludicrous. I think EPA is just
-- it borders on absurdity to try to regulate at these levels. Now,
that independent from Yucca Mountain. That's just a technical point of
view on my part.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Bill. I think that was the
point that Milt Levenson might have wanted to make. I guess it does go
back to the public acceptability, risk communication idea that Judy
raised in terms of public acceptability. Of course, there is a debate
about the linear no threshold, as to whether that is actually the state
of affairs. Does the public understand the implications of radiation
dose? Does that play a role in public acceptance?
Milt, you have your card back up again. Go ahead.
MR. LEVENSON: No, I just wanted to comment and support Mel
Murphy's statement about the public not understanding probability as
it's used. I think he's defining is much too narrowly. It's not only
the public at large. Most technical people don't understand probability
of risk. I guess I don't understand it because I still drive a car.
So, you know, we have to recognize that it isn't just some people out
there that don't understand it. It's a very unusual thing, and a large
part of the technical community does not really understand it.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Milt. Ray, you started us down
this road. What do you want to say?
MR. CLARK: Just because Lynn arranged the agenda, I don't
want to be blamed for starting us down the road. No, I just wanted to
say that yes, our standards are based on linear non-threshold model and
now risk of losing general public here, but to defend what we're doing.
That's correct, and I'm not -- I should say just right up front, we have
a whole staff that looks at these issues, and I don't claim to be the
expert on the staff by any means.
We're not saying that that's the absolute predictor of
what's going to happen. In fact, in the preamble to this, you'll note
we recognize that there could be no effect at that level or there could
be effect. There could be more effect at that level than linear
threshold would predict. At this point at least, and we're continually
looking at this question. At this point at least, we think it's the
most prudent way to set public health standards without proof one way or
the other on where the actuality of it is.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you, Ray. Let's go to Abby and
then we'll come over to Mal. Abby?
MR. JOHNSON: I heard from other health physicists the same
comment that Mr. Phillips just made, and I guess from the standpoint of
the public, if -- and I don't disagree with that, but then from the
standpoint of the public, we see the EPA and the NRC duking it out over
these standards. I'm going to alienate everybody at this table before
the end of today I'm sure, but you know, I went to the NRC's meeting and
heard them say that yes, you know, they would be happy to accept the EPA
standard when it comes out, and then as soon as the EPA standard came
out, they were not happy to accept the EPA standard. So, from the
public's point of view, if it doesn't matter if it's 25 or if it's 15,
why are these two agencies fighting with each other, and what's the real
story?
Well, I know what the real story is, is that Yucca Mountain
can't meet the standards, so then it throws the project out. So, if
Yucca Mountain can't meet the standard, then that's the getting to no,
getting to yes thing -- all that.
MR. CAMERON: To make sure that there's no ambiguities here,
I think we need to hear from Bill Reamer about the happiness of the NRC.
I don't know if you were tieing those two thoughts together. In other
words, the NRC not being happy with 15 and the fact of getting the
repository licensed. If you were, I think that needs to be explored
because that may not be the situation. Were you tieing both of those
thoughts together?
MR. JOHNSON: Chip has a way of taking what I say and
spinning it into something that's really much more profound. We work
very well together. Yes, of course I was.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, Bill.
MR. REAMER: What we said, Abby, was that we will implement
the final EPA standard. What's been proposed is a proposed standard
which needs to go through a rulemaking process, comments made, your
comments, our comments, comments from other Nevadans, comments from
other experts, and then EPA needs to look at those comments and propose
a final standard and by law, we will be consistent with that.
When we were here in June, we tried to explain the basis for
our proposal of 25, and we tried to explain it was based on what we
thought the science and technology supported. We are taking a hit
because since we're at 25 and the EPA is at 15, you know, what I'm
hearing is we're interested in licensing the repository. That's, I
think, an unfortunate conclusion that's a wrong conclusion, but it's a
conclusion that people will draw. We're not interested in licensing the
repository. We're interested in getting a quality application and
running a process that includes everyone, the public as well, and
reaching an unbiased objective decision based on the science and the
technology. That's what we're interested in.
That's what I'll talk about in an hour, but unfortunately I
think you're probably reflecting what other people may believe, which is
that the basis for the NRC position on 25 is that it wants to license
the repository, and that's not what we said in June. That's not what we
said in March, and that's what we -- and it's not what we're saying now.
What our comments will say, you know, we'll have to wait until those are
issued, but they will be rooted in what we think is the best
information, the way we regulate across the United States, not just here
but at all the other facilities that we regulate.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Bill. I just, regardless of
these connections, I think Abby's point is obviously a conflict or a
disagreement between two federal agencies on standards probably doesn't
do much to promote public understanding or acceptability. Some of you
may address this next question, but is 25 millirem versus 15 millirem
going to be a crucial distinction in terms of licensing the repository,
and if you could address that as you -- let's go to Mal and then Abe,
and we'll come to Bill Phillips. Mal?
MR. MURPHY: I want to address that last question right now.
I'll be happy to do it at some point in time during the day, but I just
wanted to suggest to Milt Levenson that from my non-technical, non-
scientific perspective, it's precisely because you do understand the
probabilities that you're willing to get in your car. If, sticking with
one in a million, if the probability of you being killed in an
automobile accident every time you leave the house to drive to the drug
store is one in a million, then the probability is overwhelming, you
understand and I do, that nothing bad is going to happen to you. So,
I'll go to the drug store. But if, as you're leaving the house you
think hmmm, someone in my community is going to die in an automobile
accident as a certainty, someone will be killed, do I want that to be
me. You may be more likely to go back in and do all your shopping on
the Internet and just stay home, but it's because you understand, you
know, what that probability means that if there's an overwhelming
probability that nothing bad is going to happen to me today, that you're
willing to get in your car and drive it down to the drug store.
I think that's the kind of thing, and that's an
oversimplification I'm sure, but that's, you know, that's the kind of
thing that we, you know, the whole community, the whole scientific,
technical, regulatory, legal community has not clearly communicated to
the public for the last 50 years, I think.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, that's an important point. Thanks, Mal.
Abe?
MR. VAN LUIK: You know, on the 15, 25 issue, I know that,
you know, there are different perspectives within the Department of
Energy. My perspective from a performance assessment point of view is,
and this is taking us back to the whole issue of certainty, there's
enough uncertainty in the system that if we come in somewhere between 15
and 25, we're probably dead in the water. We need to be well below
that. We need to be able to demonstrate that we will be and stay well
below that. So, from my perspective, from EPA perspective, 15 and 25,
it's a trivial issue.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Abe. Let's go to Bill Phillips
for a last comment up here and go out to the audience for ten minutes
before we take a break. Bill?
MR. PHILLIPS: I think you asked a question of whether you
can measure a difference between 15 and 25 in the environment. Did you
ask that?
MR. CAMERON: No, I just was wondering whether 15 versus 25
would make a difference in the licensing of a repository.
MR. PHILLIPS: Well, it's certainly measurable, and it
could. You know, I mean, you could measure, like I said, down at one
millirem per year or even a tenth of a millirem per year. So, if you
came in at 18 or something like that with your confirmatory
measurements, that's hundreds of times above what our limits of
measurability are.
I have a question for Ray, and maybe even Bill Reamer. If
by your own admission EPA has no idea what these risk numbers really
mean, that there may not be any cancers produced at 15 millirem, or
maybe the risk assessment is ten to the minus four or five times ten to
the minus fourth. Then why is there an argument between EPA and the NRC
at this minute, infinitesimal small level? I mean, why is there not
agreement between NRC and EPA at a level where you can't even determine
if anything's happening?
MR. CAMERON: Okay, fair last question for Bill.
MR. PHILLIPS: Historically there has been agreement. It's
really been relatively recently that the disagreement has developed. I
think perhaps maybe a process needs to be followed to resolve the
disagreement, and of course, in this particular proceeding, it will be
resolved by law, and this particular matter will be resolved by law
because Congress has said by law, EPA sets the standard and we must be
consistent with it.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, Ray?
MR. CLARK: I don't know that I can comment on why there's a
disagreement. There's two main bases I can tell you why we're at 15.
One is because that's the same as our generic standard which was issued
in '85 and amended in '92. The second is that, based on our analyses,
and again this goes to LNT again, that falls within the risk range that
NAS recommended to use.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Steve, I see you have your card up, but
I want to see if we have anybody out here before we take a break. Now,
this is on the subject that we've been talking about here. Let's go to
Ian Zabarte.
MR. ZABARTE: Good morning. My name is Ian Zabarte. I'm
the assistant to Chief Yaol of the Western Shoshoni government. We have
a formal legal relationship with the United States, and this is
manifested through the treaty of Ruby Valley, which covers about 40,000
square miles of the west in the Great Basin, four states, what you call
states. According to some of those laws, such as the enabling act for
the territory of Nevada, our territory is not to be included into any of
the boundaries of the state or territory of Nevada, and with that, some
of these counties aren't even constitutional.
That aside, with regard to dose, we don't even know what our
dose is, being western Shoshoni. I don't think anybody up there knows
what our dose is, and we are investigating exactly what our exposure has
been in the past. It's going to take a lot of work, and we've gotten
more funding recently to continue that work. We're going to be the ones
determining which standards are used for our people, and then we're
going to go ahead and try to enforce that against all of the people who
would destroy our health.
We have a lot of work ahead of us.
The Nagasaki studies are accurate, from what I'm
understanding, until 1986 in the DS86, or dose system -- dosimetry
system 1986. New research has discovered that it wasn't accurate.
Now, we have different lifestyles and because of that, we
have different shielding from the environment, we have different
exposure pathways, and with regard to the graphic Steve Frishman put up
there, with the little man with the hat, I assume he's a cowboy. Now,
Indians aren't cowboys. We're Indians. So that didn't appear to be an
Indian to me.
And until about the 1940s, even 1950s, we would consistently
move into, through the Nevada test site area and it was at that time
that we started being forcefully removed and kept out by the United
States military.
But I think that it's safe to assume that as soon as all of
you leave, including the counties, when you shut down all those gold
mines, that we're going to be doing the same thing we've been doing for
the last 10,000 years. And that with regard to the group which is at
risk, you need to consider Indians. You have a Washington Indian here,
but you don't have any Western Shoshonee at your table, and this
gentleman over here doesn't represent the Western Shoshonee government,
he doesn't represent our interests, and he hasn't in the past. I just
want to make that clear, in your formal round table stakeholder
discussion.
Thank you.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks Ian. We'll visit on that
particular issue.
Let's go over to this side, then we'll come back here. Mike
Baughman, Lincoln County, who will be joining us.
MR. BAUGHMAN: Thanks Chip. Just a couple of observations.
Abby mentioned that it seems as though that these standards and perhaps
controversy is a lot about getting TS rather than getting to know, and
that we always work on getting TS.
I would suggest that there is another side of that ideology
which says no solution is the best solution, and there are certainly
those around the table that would advocate that, as well.
I guess what I wonder is with the controversy between the 15
and the 25, is there a cost implication to the project of going from 25
to 15, and if there is, it seems to me that we should all be considering
that the primary source of risk in this project is transportation. It's
not the repository itself.
Most fatalities will occur as a result of transportation
operations. And if the difference between a 15 and a 25 millirem
standard really provides no significant public health benefit at perhaps
a very large cost, then perhaps those of us that are responsible
decision-makers ought to consider reallocating the cost of going from 25
to 15, to making the transportation system safer, which will undoubtedly
better protect public health and safety.
Thank you.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you. There is a creative thought. I
mean, we don't usually get too creative in this business, but perhaps
taking the allocation of resources from one area where there is a lower
risk and moving it over to where there is a higher risk might be
something that should be considered.
Mike, you got a couple of cards raised on that. Comments?
Let's take those quickly and go back out to the audience, and then take
a break. Judy, and then Mal.
MS. TREICHEL: Well, I think something has been missing here
and I don't understand why it is, but it's not necessarily an argument
between 15 and 25. All the flares went up when there was a four
millirem ground water standard and when Yucca Mountain, as Steve showed
the plume coming from there, when the repository fails, it exposes
people through ground water.
So we're talking about a ground water release. And there is
a lot of disagreement and I have heard very different numbers and facts
than what Bill Phillips gave as far as radiation exposure and one of the
things that the public is aware of is that when risk and dose numbers
are changed, when standards are changed, it's because there has been a
dreadful discovery that people are dead and you find out as a result of
something bad happening.
And that's why the radiation exposure limits have come down.
That's why, because of Alice Stewart's work, we don't X-ray pregnant
women. That's why a lot of things have changed and people know that
they change because you prove that something bad happened to you, if you
can.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Judy, for that caution. Let's go to
Mal quickly and then to Abe. We're going to get set to close down now.
Go ahead.
MR. MURPHY: What Mike Baughman said raises kind of a
question or an issue, in my mind, that we might think about over the
break and perhaps some people might want to discuss it after the break.
Of course, neither the EPA standard, the proposed Part 197,
nor the NRC's Part 60 or proposed Part 63 apply to transportation. So
the 15 -- the argument over 15 versus 25 millirem does not -- that
argument is irrelevant to the transportation issue, which raises a
question, in my mind, and that is why should there be different risks,
why shouldn't it -- you know, just taking, for the sake of argument, and
we may want it ultimately to be even lower, but for the sake of
argument, assuming that the EPA's 15 millirem standard is the better
one, why shouldn't that apply across the board to all aspects and all
activities associated with the management of nuclear waste and
ultimately disposal in Yucca Mountain.
I'd just pose that question.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Mal. Let's go to a final table
comment. Abe, go ahead.
MR. VAN LUIK: Just to respond to my neighbor Judy here.
When we have looked at the ground water versus the total all pathway
dose standard, it's specific to which isotope you're dealing with, of
course. When neptunium is involved, generally, the water pathway is
one-tenth of the total all pathway dose.
So a four millirem standard could be equivalent to as high
as a 40 millirem all pathway dose standard. So whether it becomes
controlling or not is very specific to where the point of compliance is,
when the point of compliance is, and what radionuclides come through at
the point of compliance at that time.
So to say that one is controlling and the other isn't is a
little bit less sealed at this point.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks. We're getting ready to take a
break. I want to go out to the audience for one comment. And I would
apologize in advance to the audience. I'm going to have to ask you to
make it brief and may have to ask you to summarize.
Sally.
MS. DEVLIN: Thank you. I want to thank everybody for
coming to Nevada and it's so nice to see so many familiar faces. Of
course, I'm going to give Dr. Garrick hell for, again, sitting with his
back to us, as I did in Amergosa, and being a toastmaster, you know you
don't do that.
Anyway, I didn't come to say that and I came here for very
serious things. And I want to thank Ray Clark for sending me the
Federal Register, which I read.
The first thing that really disturbed me was not only on the
risk, but there is no stress, whether you want to use risk or dose or
what. My friends are still suffering from Three Mile Island.
And the second thing is this meeting should be held in Nye
County, because we're talking transportation and the EIS is absolutely
vacuous on that. We're talking risk. We have no medicine, and that's
what I came to tell you, in Nye County. We have no hospital. We have
absolutely nothing at the test site, absolutely, at the Tonapot test
range, nor at Nellis.
We have the most dangerous highway in the world, which is
95. The report that says that there are a few pedestrians at Indian
Springs, there are 3,000 locked-in prisoners there. All of the numbers,
all of the information is fallacious, is a good word.
The second thing is I have sent the center to read a plan
for virtual medicine for all of Nye County and this -- if you don't know
what virtual medicine is, I am glad to give you a lecture on it. We're
trying to get virtual schools and virtual libraries.
But the most important thing there is nothing, if there are
any accidents or anything in Nye County, to do anything with it, and
this is absolutely terrifying.
There is not one mention of this in any of the literature.
And, believe me, I read the 1,600 pages.
So that's all I want to say and I hope I am provoking you on
this because something has got to be done and said for us people.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you very much, Sally. Maybe a virtual
lecture on that stuff.
Let's take a break. We had a half-hour scheduled for you.
I have 20 after ten. Why don't we come back at 10:45, so that will cut
a little bit off.
Thank you.
[Recess.]
MR. CAMERON: We're going to get to the next item on the
agenda, which is NRC's use of safety assessment to support licensing
decisions. Bill Reamer, in about two minutes, but there was one quick
comment that a member of the audience had that we want to go to and Mal
Murphy has a quick overarching issue for us to consider throughout the
presentation.
Grant, do you want to make your point about probability?
MR. HUDLOW: Certainly. The thing that I heard was that the
one latent cancer death per million did not mean that every year one
person in a million is going to be fatally infected with some
radioactivity.
Well, if it doesn't mean that, what does it mean?
MR. CAMERON: Mal, you have a point and maybe you want to --
I don't know if you want to address Grant's point, since you brought
this up, while you're making yours. But why don't you speak and then
we're going to go to Bill Reamer and get started.
MR. MURPHY: I won't directly address Grant's point because
I'm not a qualified expert in that area, but it's certainly a good
question and it's a question that the experts and health physicists have
to -- and probabilities -- have to address.
But I just wanted to make one point that I think everybody
has to keep in mind, and it's, again, apropos to what Milt Levenson said
about driving his car.
That is, one of the reasons you are willing to get in your
car every day, Milt, is because even though you recognize that there is
some risk involved in that, you have some control over that risk. You
need to worry about what other people are doing behind the wheels of
their car, but you can control what you yourself are doing behind the
wheel of yours.
The people who are -- I don't want to use the word exposure,
but the people who are placed at risk as a result of the management of
nuclear waste have no control whatsoever over that risk that they are
being exposed to involuntarily by someone else. So that's a big, big
difference, in people's minds, it seems to me.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Mal. I think that we need to give
Robert a chance to perhaps respond to something earlier. Go ahead,
Robert.
MR. HOLDEN: Well, maybe not to beat a dead horse, but just
kick it a couple of times anyway.
That same analogy, I guess, holds true in terms of the
choices, the options, the willful choices that you make daily.
Concerning the circumstances of those folks who live in the Nevada area,
what's now known as the Nevada area, the things that happen there, the
testing, all the things that were heaped upon these lands in terms of
radiation exposure, that was certainly not willful.
Minimal testing was done to those populations and certainly
not to the plants, the animals, and the water that these folks ingested
for years. And, also, even when testing was begun, just talking to some
of the folks in those areas, that some folks may have been subject to
health assessments, but those seem to stop at reservation borders, at
reservation lines.
So those things, when you consider the mistrust, the
distrust that's out there, there's reasons for it and they're valid
reasons, in my mind. So we have to be careful as to what we think
without putting ourselves in those places sometimes.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you very much, Robert. Bill, are you
ready? Bill Reamer.
MR. REAMER: Okay, Chip. I'm going to just stay among the
group. I don't have slides to present. I do have four concepts that I
want to present, however, that I think are important in understanding
how NRC will use safety assessment.
The first concept is that we will hold DOE primarily
responsible for the safety assessment. The second concept I will talk
about is that we will independently oversee -- and by oversee, I mean we
will monitor and we will assess and we will conclude, and that will be
independent. We're an independent agency -- we will independently
oversee DOE, including DOE's safety assessment.
The third concept I want to talk about is that we will
rigorously review the safety assessment document that DOE prepares when
they submit it to us. The fourth concept I want to talk about is that
we will involve the public throughout our process.
So the first concept I mentioned is that DOE has primary
responsibility for the safety assessment. There are certain obligations
we feel that go with that responsibility that DOE has, that primary
responsibility.
The first is the safety assessment must meet all our rules.
Now, that means it must include all the information that we require it
to include and we will review that, and, specifically, the information
that is provided must be complete and accurate. That's an affirmative
obligation on the Department of Energy.
Another obligation that DOE must bear is it must control all
significant changes to the safety assessment, control meaning to review
those and to reach conclusions about them and to document that.
The third point is that DOE must, according to our rules,
keep the safety assessment up-to-date.
Another obligation that goes with DOE's primary
responsibility is that they must prove that the public is protected.
They have the burden to prove safety.
The third point under the -- that I would make under this
first concept is that DOE must carry out its safety assessment
responsibilities with very high standards. Some have heard the
terminology "adopt the nuclear culture" and this is what I have in mind.
It's the type of attitude that our other licensees, our reactor
licensees, bring to bear in discharging their responsibilities, and we
are going to expect the Department of Energy to do the same.
The second concept I want to talk about that's important to
the way we will use safety assessment is that we will independently
oversee DOE throughout the process. We will set the rules for DOE.
It's our responsibility to set rules that are protective and we have
proposed Part 63, which we have presented at various times in Nevada.
We expect to complete our rulemaking, as I mentioned earlier, on
proposed Part 63 in the first quarter of the year 2000.
Those rules require, among other things, that DOE identify
and evaluate what's important to the safety assessment.
The second point I'd make under our independent oversight
concept, under the concept that we independently oversee DOE, is that we
will not license a repository at Yucca Mountain until we decide that the
DOE's safety assessment proves that DOE will meet our rules and we will
bring to that decision an impartial and objective evaluation of the
evidence. We'll weigh all the evidence and we'll make our decisions in
a phased manner to reflect what we expect will be a growing body of
evidence if this project proceeds.
The third point I'd make is that we will oversee DOE
activities to ensure that they comply with our rules. We will require
that DOE -- and oversee its performance. We will require that DOE
monitor repository conditions and repository performance and take that
information and update their safety assessment, factor it into their
safety assessment.
If the DOE doesn't do these, if they don't follow our rules,
we will cite them for violations. We have that authority.
The third point I would make is that we have the authority,
if necessary, to require that the waste be retrieved, if there is a
repository and emplacement of waste at Yucca Mountain.
The third concept that I mentioned that's important to our
use of safety assessment is that we will rigorously review the DOE's
safety assessment at all stages. We will verify that all the necessary
elements are covered in the assessment.
If the safety assessment is not complete, we will return it.
If more information is required in order for us to perform our review,
we will get it. We have the power to ask DOE questions. We have the
power to raise issues and we have the power to require that DOE respond.
In our review of the DOE safety assessment, we will apply a
broad range of expertise to our review. That includes expertise that's
available on our staff, as well as the staff of the Center for Nuclear
Waste Regulatory Analyses. This is a scientific center that we have
funded that exists for the purpose of providing advice on high level
waste matters in San Antonio. We will bring that expertise to bear in
conducting our review.
We will review all parts of the DOE safety assessment that
are important to protecting the public. We will undertake that review
in accordance with a systematic review plan and we will focus our review
on what is important to protecting the public.
The fourth concept that's important to understand in the way
in which we will use safety assessment is that the public will be
involved throughout our process. We understand that it's our
responsibility to take affirmative steps to involve the public and we
will do this by establishing a relationship for the long term that
creates opportunities for the public to be involved in our process. We
will listen to and we will hear and we will respond to public concerns.
Tonight is a good example, where we will hear public
concerns. And when we hear and respond to those concerns, we understand
and we will respond in language that the public can understand.
Public involvement will take various forms. We will create
opportunities for informal dialogue. Our next meeting, as I mentioned
to some people, in this area, will be on November 2, where we will
discuss the regulatory concept of defense-in-depth. This really stems
from a comment that the State of Nevada made in meetings that the
Commission held in March on the viability assessment, in which it
questioned the way in which the Commission was proceeding in using this
regulatory concept defense-in-depth.
It's a concept we have discussed in our public meetings in
March and in June and it's another concept -- and we will be holding
another meeting on the second of November on this.
Other forms of participation can include participation in
formal -- in our formal process, in the public hearings that the NRC
will hold if there is a license application from the DOE.
In addition, we're working to improve our public access to
the safety assessment information that we have.
So in sum -- and let me make one other point; that all of
our activities will be documented and they will be open to public view.
So in summary, I felt it is important in understanding how
we will use safety assessment to really emphasize four points; that we
hold DOE primarily responsible for the safety assessment, that we will
independently oversee them, that we will rigorously review the documents
they prepare and submit to us for review, and that we will involve the
public throughout our process.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks a lot, Bill. We're going to go to Bill
Vasconi, and then Judy Treichel. But first, let me do something I
should have done earlier and introduce Mike Baughman, who joined us.
Just give your name and your affiliation.
MR. BAUGHMAN: Mike Baughman, Lincoln County.
MR. CAMERON: See, that wasn't hard. Thanks, Mike. Bill?
MR. VASCONI: Yes. Bill, I appreciated your comments. The
NRC, which has been around for a considerable -- nice going, guys.
MR. CAMERON: I hope we don't have to get this table remade
now.
MR. VASCONI: One would think, with the involvement we do
have coming to these meetings, and several of us participate in any
number of them, we could afford to have a little more elbow room, et
cetera, on this round table discussion.
Most of my comments are all wet anyway, so we'll start
there.
Bill, I did appreciate your four comments as far as safety
assessment. One of the things that has repeatedly come to my mind in
meetings where Lake Barrett, Russ Dryer, et cetera, were representing
the Yucca Mountain project, a good many folks would find the project
more acceptable to their communities, to their way of thinking, by use
of the word retrievability.
You know, at one point in time, we were going to cover that
back up and plant natural vegetation, put a granite stone on top of it
in 40 different languages telling folks what's buried under there, like
somebody was going to forget. But we use the word retrievability. I
don't know why that word retrievability could not be extended beyond a
50-year period of time.
I have heard periods here lately of 100 years, I've heard
periods of quite possibly 300.
Why can't we have it monitored? Why can't we have
temperature probes? Why can't we have moisture probes? Why can't we
leave it retrievable for the near future? If we're talking 10,000
years, what's wrong with it being retrievable for 500?
And, again, with further education, et cetera, maybe we can
resolve and solve some of the problems that may show up within that
first 500 years.
Thank you.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks a lot, Bill. Let's get Judy.
MS. TREICHEL: First, I just had a question. You said that
there was going to be a long-term relationship with the public
established and that tonight was a good example.
How was the public invited to the thing tonight?
MR. CAMERON: Lynn?
MS. DEERING: What we did was advertise, I think, three or
four times in several newspapers and I sent out a public announcement to
as many people I could through the counties. I tried to use my county
contacts to get the word out and I got some mailing lists, with several
hundred people on it.
We did then make special -- we tried to contact universities
and we tried to just get the word out to -- reasonably, in the timeframe
we had, to everybody we could.
MS. TREICHEL: Okay, because I didn't see anything in the
paper and I usually watch that pretty closely.
MS. DEERING: Really? It was -- my understanding was it was
to be ran at least two or three times before the meeting, starting about
two weeks before, and I know we advertised -- it was supposed to have
appeared in the Las Vegas Review Journal and the -- I think it was --
MS. TREICHEL: The Sun?
MS. DEERING: It might have been Times.
MS. TREICHEL: That as just a curiosity.
MS. DEERING: But if it didn't show up, I need to know that.
I really need to know that, if, for whatever reasons, that didn't run.
MS. TREICHEL: Maybe we have somebody here that can tell us
how we can check it, check with the reporter.
MS. DEERING: We'll follow up on that.
MS. TREICHEL: My actual question for discussion here and I
guess one that I want to keep coming up and for people to keep thinking
about was the issue that Abby had brought up earlier about everybody is
inclined to think that successful public communication means that the
public suddenly agrees with the project and that if you educate them
correctly, then they will go for the project.
And as was pointed out in a paper that I heard delivered
earlier this year, educating people means that they then have tools to
make their own decisions and they may not agree with you, but they'll
know they don't.
And I would like us to be thinking and I'd like to pose the
question how can the public get people to say no, to not do the
repository. And just as an example, I mentioned to somebody recently
that maybe it's like buying insurance, that you buy insurance if you
want to avoid a risk, and they said, well, no, that's a mitigation. You
buy health insurance, you might get sick, but your health insurance
helps mitigate.
And the only other thing I could think of was when the mob
was very prominent in Las Vegas, people bought protection and that did
avoid the risk.
So how would Nevadans go about getting out of this? Would
there be a price to pay or -- and that sounds like a joke, but it's
really not. How do you get out of this thing if you don't want it?
MR. CAMERON: Judy put a number of issues on the table, one
of which is -- all of them are important, but the first one was that
what's the goal of public education and communication.
In other words, it shouldn't be equated to public
acceptance. It should be giving the public the information to make a
decision, and that's one point, I think.
MS. TREICHEL: And that decision has to be able to be for or
against. It doesn't matter if you say yes if you're not allowed to say
no.
MR. CAMERON: Right. And if it's -- then I think that --
then you sort of made an assumption that if it's no, how is that
communicated, and that is an assumption about what this what Nevadans
feel about it.
Can we try to explore that, Bill?
MR. REAMER: Well, let me just make a couple of points.
One, my goal and the goal of the staff in communicating and involving
the public is not to obtain public acceptance. We are not a supporter
of the project and we don't expect that our public involvement would
lead to anyone becoming a supporter of the project.
What we do want, what we hope that we will get is a clear
understanding of what the public concerns are, because they can drive
our review, for example; they can help us to focus on certain portions
of the safety assessment; if we know there are concerns related to
earthquakes, that these are important concerns. When we come out, we
hear these concerns.
They can inform our review and we can present the results of
our review and focus on that, so that people perhaps learn more about
this particular issue.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Bill. How about some other
perspectives, Mal, on Judy's comments?
MR. MURPHY: One of the things I think that's always driven
Nye County's program in this respect is the unfortunate need to
acknowledge that there is no way of saying no, that the ultimate
decision with respect to whether or not nuclear waste will be emplaced
and hopefully isolated in Yucca Mountain would be made by someone other
than the citizens of Nye County or the elected leadership of Nye County.
We sort of have to accept that in a representative democracy
and, therefore, our program and our policy has always been to exercise
our oversight responsibilities to ensure that the decision is made on
the right bases and not made for political or for other purposes.
But I think the answer we have to appreciate and
acknowledge. I mean, we may not like it, it may make us individually
uncomfortable, but we have to acknowledge the fact that in a -- on a
public policy decision such as this, individual members of the public do
not have the right to say yes or no, but they certainly have the right
to express their feelings and their fears and their concerns or their
support and enthusiasm, if they want to, and they have the right to
insist that the people who do ultimately make that policy decision on
their behalf take those concerns into account and to do what is fair and
equitable to accommodate and mitigate and compensate the people to whom
that risk is being transferred, in many cases against their ultimate
wishes.
MR. CAMERON: That's sort of following up on Bill's point,
that outside of the political process, obviously, the emphasis is on
make sure the decision is made on the right basis.
MR. MURPHY: Right. I mean, we've always insisted that the
site characterization be thorough and complete and based on conservative
and accurate science and that the standards, whether adopted by the NRC
or the EPA, are based on conservative science, that the process is open
and all encompassing and allows for a complete and full airing of the
issues both by litigants in a licensing hearing, as well as by members
of the public, et cetera.
But we really have to acknowledge the fact that there are no
individual citizens in Nye County or elsewhere who are ultimately going
to be able to say yes, I choose this risk, or no, I don't.
You can always move away, I suppose, but that's not an
answer. That's not an acceptable way to vote, in my judgment at least.
That's always been our position, is that because we didn't
go out looking for this risk, Nye County didn't volunteer for this
program, isn't volunteering for it now, and we recognize that we are not
going to ultimately have the veto. We don't even have the right of
filing a notice of disapproval that the state has, for example,
enforcing that ultimate decision to be made at the Congressional level.
So our position has always been to insist that when this
decision is made, it be made on the correct conservative bases.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you. Let's go to Bill Vasconi, then
Abe, and then we'll come over to Robert Holden, and then Dennis Bechtel.
MR. VASCONI: One of the things I would like to point out is
although you see the political side of the story and you know there's a
number of people that are totally against the repository, there are a
good many Nevadans that feel that it is a national issue. There's
probably some 75 percent of Nevadans that feel whether we want it or
not, the repository will be built, Yucca Mountain will be utilized.
There's also a number of us that would like to see some
equity entitlements come into the state, whether through our roads,
through grants to the universities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But the bottom line on it, who would vote on yes or no as
far as the citizens of Nevada, I would assume, in the rural counties,
you'll find a great, a larger percentage of second, third and fourth
generation Nevadans, that here in Clark County, and these are statistics
that are available, 50 percent of the people now living in Clark County
have been here less than ten years. We've got a great influx of people.
Well, less than ten years, they've been here from someplace
else, then, haven't they?
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks. Thanks, Bill. Abe?
MR. VAN LUIK: And there is nothing wrong intrinsically in
having come here less than ten years ago from somewhere else. I insist.
It's been my unfortunate experience, as a Department of
Energy employee, to have learned a few things in the recent past. One
thing is I thought that I could actually go into a roomful of the public
and say something that would persuade them. Very quickly, I learned
that is not the thing to do.
In fact, the thing that I asked for help on is how to
inform, but not, at the same time, inflame, and even that is sometimes
not easy to do, because you're dealing with the people who are saying
why are you doing this to me.
And you can explain all you want about the equity of the
risk and how you're moving it from one place to another, very nicely
done, by the way, but the point still is that it's a very personal thing
for most people that are in your audience.
However, one of the more -- one of the better things that we
did is, not too long ago, we went around the country and we randomly
sampled and brought in people in focus groups and talked to them about,
for example, the VA performance assessment curves and how they could be
explained, and it was refreshing to see that when you randomly sample
people, we did have some people that were dead set against this, but
most people said I don't know what you're talking about, tell me about
it.
And when we did tell them about it, using ways of talking to
them, they said, well, basically, as long as it's not in my backyard, I
don't have any objection. But even the people that we talked to in
Nevada, we got comments like I'm going to look through your document
when it comes out, the VA and the EIS, and if I can think of something
that you haven't thought of, I will have no confidence whatsoever in
what you're talking about; but if you've covered this, this and this
base, then I will think, yeah, you're pretty well on.
Because we showed them curves, we showed them equations, we
showed them what the kind of stuff that we were doing, and they said,
huh, what are you trying to pull here. But if I can think of something
you haven't thought of.
And in communicating risk, you have to go to that -- and
it's not a lower level, it's a level at which people work. It's a level
that you and I work on when we're dealing with something we don't
understand. Like when somebody comes in and says this is your risk of
getting a cancer from sunlight or something like that. You say okay.
Anyway, my point was I have given up and I think DOE, as a
unit, has given up in seeking public acceptance. It is our job to
inform and it is our duty to inform in such a way that it's actually
informative rather than inflammatory.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Abe. There is a comment off the
record that we won't pick up. Let's go to Robert and then to Dennis.
Robert?
MR. HOLDEN: Once in a while I have actually a good excuse
for being late, and such was the case this morning. I was on the phone
with some folks regarding notification of some tribal leaders to see if
they wanted to participate in radiological emergency preparedness
exercises and activities, which have been going on for a number of
years.
Most states have that infrastructure in place. They have
radiological health officers. They have state departments of
transportation trained, as well as response teams trained in rad
response. But such is not the case with the tribes, even though they've
been impacted, even some live next door to a utility, the closest
neighbor is the border of some of the utilities where all this hot stuff
will be coming from.
But what it's taken is that it's taken a whole change of
mind set, the way FEMA did business, most of the folks came from the
states or go back to the states from FEMA. And I guess my point is that
that's something that the NRC needs to be mindful of in terms of what is
safety and what does that mean to the risk that's out there.
Are these folks going to feel safe? Is there going to be an
accident? Will they be protected? What are the different pathways has
been discussed as to where they take some of this material, exposed
materials, exposed animals, plants and so forth.
And in doing so, you're going to have to go the extra step
and that's always been the basis of not doing many things by the
agencies. It's going to take too much time, it's going to take too much
money to contact each of these tribal governments, which, by the way,
we're speaking of thousands of years in the future, which have been
there thousands of years in the past and they're still there, and, as
was expressed here earlier, plan on being here when that few thousand
years comes around.
So it's going to take a way of interacting with those tribal
leaders to apprise them of, as I said a while ago, and I don't want to
be too redundant here, but to interact with them.
I'm glad to see -- believe me, I'm glad to see that some of
the county and the local folks, residents, in these lands are able to
sit here at the table and in the audience, but the tribal folks don't
have that luxury. They don't have the infrastructure. They don't have
the resources, and they're beginning to rely on -- and it's taken this
long to rely on some of the county folks to extend that cooperative
relationship and it's working in some cases, but that's not the way it
should be.
And that's -- the NRC can say, well, that's not our fault.
Well, it may not be your fault, but you do have some oversight over DOE
activities and the DOE has not seemed to provide the same resources to
the tribal governments as they have some of these other governmental
entities.
So that's something that needs to be changed, as well as in
terms of protection. There is an interesting and -- and they talked
about the cultural impacts of Yucca Mountain. It was done by non-Indian
anthropologists, archeologists, certainly not from this area, who met
some folks here and talked with them and wrote what they wanted to
write.
But also contained in there are passages from some of the
cultural and spiritual leaders in this place and they talked about what
would happen, as well as talked about what's out there and how it's
alive and the viable continuation of life itself based on interaction of
those tribal people in that community.
This is still one big community. I see biosphere stuck up
there in several places. This is one biosphere. It's one -- so it's
going to recur, it's going to come out.
So you also have to -- we also need to be mindful of those
cultural impacts and that's part of safety, because that culture is
intermingled. You can't separate the culture from the social or from
the political and so forth.
We're also subject to the political whims in terms of what
Congress allows the tribes and what Congress allows in terms of funding
or programmatic areas, but that's part of the administration. That's
the treaties that were made with the United States Government. That
means every agency. There's executive order and executive memorandums
regarding this, how to interact with tribes, and drop those barriers and
ensure that those things are taken care of.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Robert. I think you see that
the discussion on the NRC's role in safety assessment is taking us back
to risk communication again. Judy started us off with risk
communication, the goal should not be to convince the public of
something. I think Abe seconded that and gave us the phrase how to
inform without inflaming. I think Robert is raising the issue of how do
you give people assurance of safety.
Sometimes you may, depending on the group or the situation,
have to take extra steps, and, also, his point from this morning about
how do you assure that people have the resources to participate in these
types of decisions.
I don't want to lose focus on what can the advisory
committee do about all this, so we're going to be revisiting this risk
communication idea throughout the day.
So let's not lose sight of perhaps providing them with some
recommendations.
Let's go to Dennis, and then over to Steve. Dennis?
MR. BECHTEL: This will be the last time I pose this -- Fred
Dilger, the real Fred has arrived.
MR. CAMERON: Thank God, we can get rid of this guy.
MR. BECHTEL: Just a couple of rambling comments here. I
like what Bill has to say about involving the public, that's important,
although I feel the conditions have to be present to make sure that it's
a meaningful experience.
I didn't quite care what maybe Abe said about the informing.
I think it needs to be more than informing. There needs to be a lot of
interaction and you're not going to like everything you hear and as the
public, and I work for local government and I get involved in a lot of
other public issues, so I know the public doesn't always like what I
like to hear, but I think it's important to get that flavor.
I would like to think that the counties have an oversight
role, the state does, and I would like to think that, getting back to
the yes-no about Yucca Mountain, I would like to think that perhaps the
process is open enough that if there is something really flawed with
Yucca Mountain, that the country decides to do something else.
I think that the counties and the state, I think, feel as if
we're very much protective of the public, we're also conscious -- the
conscious -- if I'm saying it right -- of the process, to make sure the
process is done properly; if there are smoking guns out there, that they
are discovered and we decide DOE has the intestinal fortitude to go back
to Congress and say, okay, this is not going to work.
So I think we have to keep in mind that this is not a done
deal. Politically, living in Nevada, we get the impression that, for
many reasons, that's probably the case, but I think we feel compelled
because it's our responsibility to ensure that if there are some great
problems, that this -- we're able to have the ability to convey it as
the public in a reasonable way and the fact that perhaps these things
are changeable.
The other thing, within the range of risks, there are a
number of risks out there that we talked about earlier and that
involving the public, we're able to deliberate local problems and maybe
there's some corrections that can happen because of the interaction. So
I think that's important.
And the NRC is a valuable part of protection of the public.
You are the regulator and I know the counties had a meeting with the NRC
earlier in the year where we talked about the EIS, environmental impact
statement, and our concern about how NRC will treat DOE's view of the
EIS, given the fact that we have a lot of problems with it.
And we're hopeful that all these things are sensitizing the
NRC to the fact that you are kind of the bottom line and kind of holding
the fort on problems either with the site itself or problems that are
part of community concerns.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks a lot, Dennis. Let's hear from Steve
and then we'll hear from Mal.
MR. FRISHMAN: I was trying to put some of this into the
context that you mentioned and that we brought up right at the
beginning, and that's the unique role of the committee.
I guess what comes to mind now, because of just current
activity and how controversial it is, the potential role of the
committee in these rulemakings that are going on. I think what may make
it important, and I'm not sure of even the mechanism for it, is with the
proposed Part 63, I gather that the response was maybe greater than
expected and some of that response having to do with a controversy
between the Commission and EPA.
And a lot of the comment, I would imagine, is sort of beyond
the nuts and bolts of rulemaking. It's much more at the level that is
questioning how risk decisions get made, because that's what these two
rules are all about.
What they're trying to do is setting what the department
then says is an acceptable standard and, also, setting not only the
standard, but how you determine whether the standard has been applied
properly and whether compliance is there.
But it seems to me that the committee could have some type
of a role beyond the early advice to the Commission that, yes, this is
worth publishing to get comment, it seems to me that you might be able
to go the next step and look at the way the staff deals with comment,
and especially because of the controversial nature of this particular
rulemaking, and, also, the importance of this rulemaking, given it
represents, for the Part 63, it represents quite a departure from the
very hard thinking that went into Part 60.
And even the suggestion that it's a new approach to
rulemaking, because we have learned so much since Part 60. That's a
statement that's out there.
I'm not sure really what it is that justifies that statement
or certainly justifies a change in the approach to the rulemaking. So
maybe sometime during the day, any of the members of the committee or
staff might have some ideas for, first of all, whether it's within your
unique role to look at the moving rulemaking and where your advice may
fit back into the picture.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks a lot, Steve. Hopefully we can put a
finer point on that and come up with some other ideas. But as I
understand what you're saying, that the ACNW might play a unique --
might play a role in the review of the NRC staff evaluation of the
comments on proposed Part 63.
MR. FRISHMAN: Right, because that's what takes you to a
final rule.
MR. CAMERON: Well, we're going to note these and we will
come back to that. John, did you want to say anything?
DR. GARRICK: I just wanted to comment on that, because I
think Steve makes an important and excellent point. Clearly, the
committee is in the path of the evolution of Part 63 and I think we have
every intention of continuing to have a presence in how it evolves.
So I think that's a very good comment and we've noted it.
MR. CAMERON: Great.
MR. FRISHMAN: Can I just make sure you that understand that
sort of built into this would be the need to go deep enough to
understand what the varying range of public comment was all about.
MR. CAMERON: Yes. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Mal?
MR. MURPHY: Thanks, Chip. A couple of quick points. I
want to associate myself with some of the remarks that Dennis Bechtel
made. I hope I didn't leave the impression earlier that when I said
that Nye County acknowledges that we have no ultimate yea or nay
authority over the project, that that means that we're fatalistic about
it, as is the case with Clark County, as Dennis pointed out.
We think school is still out on whether or not Yucca
Mountain is licensable as a repository and we don't think that decision
has yet been made.
One of the other things that drives our oversight program is
to ensure that if DOE -- if there is a fatal flaw and if DOE doesn't
find it, then somebody else should, and we're going to do whatever we
can to make sure that it's found either by us or by the state or by the
department or somebody, if indeed one exists.
Then secondly, I'm not sure, help me out here if I need
help, Robert, but I'm not sure that you wrote down Robert Holden's
concern broadly enough, Chip, and it affects our position, as well.
I think what Robert was saying, in part, at least, is that
safety means more to some people than are you going to cause me to have
a premature cancer. Safety can also mean are you going to negatively
impact my cultural heritage, without having any impact whatsoever on my
health.
If you deny me the ability to practice my cultural heritage,
that's harm. And from the perspective of many residents of Nye County,
for example, safety certainly means public health, it certainly means
latent cancer fatalities, but it also means are we going to be able to
maintain our agricultural lifestyle in the Amergosa Valley.
Now, everybody has to recognize that things change over time
and perhaps 10,000 years from now the Amergosa Valley will not -- the
people in the Amergosa Valley won't be able to maintain that same
agricultural lifestyle, but I think we have a right to insist that if
the agricultural lifestyle disappears, it not be as a result of Yucca
Mountain.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks for articulating that, Mal, that we're
talking about broader implications than public health. I guess the
question that people need to think about is where in the regulatory
arena do those types of impacts -- where are those types of impacts
taken into account. Indeed, from what I hear around the table, people
are very definite that those types of impacts have to be taken into
account in the decision-making somewhere.
It's a question of where is the mechanism to consider that.
The environmental impact statement, whatever. But thank you.
Abe?
MR. VAN LUIK: I wanted to give my impressions of when I was
listening to Bill Reamer give his talk. I kept thinking to myself this
even gives DOE some level of comfort that there is going to be an
independent agency that's going to be tough, it's going to be intrusive,
it's going to make sure that we do everything correctly.
That gives us a measure of comfort and another thing that it
does, when it comes to communicating risk, it is a lot easier to
communicate with the NRC who does their independent calculations and
understands how these things go than it is to communicate with other
bodies of either political origin or any other bodies, Indian tribes,
whoever, people who are not as steeped in these types of activities as
the NRC is.
So to me, dealing with the NRC and the license application,
even though that's going to be a very tough process, is probably not as
great a challenge to communicating risk as it is to communicate with the
people in this audience and other audiences.
I'm almost looking forward to the licensing process as being
a relief, because we know exactly how to talk to each other on those
kinds of issues. They understand probability.
MR. CAMERON: That's that old saying about where angels dare
to tread or something like that. Bill, and then we'll go to Mike
Baughman.
MR. REAMER: Chip, I just want to say to Dennis, I did hear
your comments and I agree with them. My third concept of a rigorous
review, I think, says if there is a fatal flaw, we, the NRC, better find
it. People are depending on that. And we will carry that out. That's
what a rigorous review, to me, means; one that goes beyond just the
words and examines the accuracy of the information, the quality of the
information, really everything about it.
And it is independent, it's an independent review. And the
other comment about communication -- I'm sorry -- another comment that
was made -- Abe, your comment that was made. I think it's important for
the NRC to recognize that what we say and what we do has to be
understood by the public and although communications can go on between
the NRC and the DOE, and that's important and they will go on, and they
will go on in a public fashion, it's our responsibility, it's the NRC's
responsibility to make sure that people understand what we're saying and
what we're doing.
That means we need to put it in terms that everyone can
understand.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Bill. Let's go quickly through the
cards that are up, so that we can get to the very important next topic,
which is how you manage uncertainty in all of this.
I'm sorry, Bill, you've had your card up for a while. Why
don't you go, and then Mike, and then Steve, the we can go to Paul
Davis.
MR. PHILLIPS: Mal mentioned that some of the perception of
risk assessment is, for instance, the Indian nation to practice their
cultural heritage. Well, I'm Scotch and Irish and I like to practice my
cultural heritage in making money here. My family has extensive
landholdings in Clark County and in Nye County and I perceive a lot of
this risk as something which could cause environmental -- or cause
financial impact upon my family and our real estate holdings. That's
another form of risk.
My home where I live is about 600 feet from where the
proposed beltway is going to go by Lone Mountain and if there were to be
a major transportation accident out there and I have major landholdings
in that area, that could be high affected.
So much of what I try to do with my education and my
background is look at this thing from a financial point of view.
It's a big risk when my family has virtue its entire wealth
tied up in land and real estate in this county and in Nye County. So
there are many of us in the State of Nevada who live there, that are
old-time residents, that if we find a showstopper anywhere along the
way, we'll jump right on the bandwagon with the NRC or the State of
Nevada or anybody else who wants to stop this project and we'll get
very, very vocal about it, because there are millions and millions and
billions of dollars in real estate holdings here that could be affected
by a big transportation accident or any other kinds of accidents that
may occur from the mountain.
So I don't see it as a done deal at all.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Bill. Let's go to Mike, and then
Steve.
MR. BAUGHMAN: I was just going to suggest, with regard to
licensing, because this discussion has to do with safety assessment and
perhaps its role in licensing, and perhaps a prospective role for the
ACNW.
I think there are those of us in the state, local
governments perhaps in the state, as well, that has concerns that the
NRC will not impose any conditions upon this project or the license for
this project that are not addressed within or emulate out of the DEIS.
In fact, I have had conversations with staff that have
perhaps suggested that. So that has led to some of the concerns we have
had about what's in the scope of the EIS, but I guess I would certainly
encourage both the NRC and the advisory committee to consider that the
possible conditions to the license should not be constrained in any way
by what might be addressed within the scope of the EIS, both in terms of
its final form and any record of decision.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Mike. I'm going to note that up here
under unique role of the advisory committee is mitigating, a broad look
at mitigating conditions and perhaps we can come back to these and
discuss them in more detail.
Steve, you want to give us a final comment on this?
MR. FRISHMAN: I just wanted to go to a specific that is in
the -- in today's reality, having to do with -- since we're on Bill's
time, having to do with the Commission's risk communication approach.
That's that the Commission members themselves have been
absolutely adamant about a standard not containing ground water
protection and the Commission's position on that I don't think has ever
been communicated to those who are most interested in the question.
It also raises a question that is, I think, fundamental to
risk communication in this country and that's that it becomes -- the
first question that comes to mind when the Commission is adamant that
ground water not be provided is why is everyone else in the country
afforded ground water protection, when, for purposes of this one
project, the ground water protection standard is so adamantly opposed.
That's me communicating the question that I hear so often
and I've never -- I've lived 24 hours a day in this business and I have
never heard a convincing or even clear statement from the Commission
about why they so adamantly oppose ground water protection in the rule.
MR. CAMERON: I think in fairness to the NRC, we'll give
Bill a chance to respond to that. But I note and I'm going to put this
up here under the advisory committee section, ensure a better rationale
on the ground water protection position.
MR. FRISHMAN: Right, because the committee itself is, in
one way or another, involved in that.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Steve. Bill?
MR. REAMER: Well, I think I hear Steve saying is the
Commission hasn't adequately communicated its position with respect to
ground water, because in the meetings that we presented in March and
June, we did set forth, at that time, the staff's explanation, and the
staff's explanation is the gist of which is we understand that ground
water is important. We understand that it's very important to the
citizens of Nevada.
Our view is, however, that when one sets a radiation
protection standards, not a standard to protect a resource, but a
standard to protect people, that that should be an all pathways standard
and that's what the basis of our position is in proposing an all
pathways standard.
We will have more detailed comments that we will provide on
the EPA rule. We will be here again next year when we promulgate our
final Part 63, to explain it, and we will continue to try to answer
Steve's question as best we can. But that's the gist of what we
presented in March and June.
MR. CAMERON: And is the NRC's position on ground water
unique to the repository?
MR. REAMER: This is the way we regulate every facility that
we regulate. We regulate through an all pathways standard.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you. Before we go to Paul, I thank you
and the public for your patience on this, we're going to get Paul Davis'
presentation in on uncertainty, because I think it sets up a lot of
issues about performance assessment.
But, first, I just want Lynn to clarify what she learned
about the newspaper ads. Lynn?
MS. DEERING: Right. This is just getting back to Judy's
question with more definitive information. We paid for ads that should
have been placed in the Las Vegas Sun, Las Vegas Review Journal, and the
Valley Times. So we better look into that and make sure it happened.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you. Mary, do you have a clarification
on that for us, before we go on?
MS. MANNING: Not only do I have a clarification, I have a
copy of the ad with me that was tacked on my computer by my editors, to
make sure I wouldn't miss this meeting, because we're going to so many
of them. But it was about the size of a three-by-five card and I have
no idea on what day it ran or anything else, but I can bring you copy of
it. I have to hike to my car.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Mary. We're going to go to Paul
Davis, who is an expert on the subject of the management and role of
uncertainty in safety assessments in lots of different forums, I think.
Paul, do you want to come up here? All right.
Paul, can I mention that you're from Sandia National Lab?
Paul is Sandia National Lab. All right.
MR. DAVIS: First of all, let me confess some embarrassment
as to this title of expert. Sorry, I don't like it. It reminds me of
what Mark Twain said, which is an expert is really just an idiot from
another county. Being New Mexico, maybe that's what I feel being here.
Or maybe an expert in uncertainty means I'm really uncertain. That may
be true, definitely true.
Because when Lynn asked me to do this talk, I said
certainly. I've done talks like this a number of times over the last 18
years or something like that, dealing in this subject. But actually, I
hadn't given one in some time, so what I did is go back and draft a
series of viewgraphs, but then when I looked at them, I really didn't
like them, because what had happened in the meantime is that I had
learned a lot more.
And in this business, learning more means you have more
uncertainty, and it absolutely means that in the repository sense, if we
look at any of the repositories we've ever had, the more we learn, the
more uncertainty increases. And please keep that in mind as one of the
guiding principles here.
The other fundamental problem I had was really just
redefining what these terms mean and what uncertainty means, what's the
role of uncertainty and how do we manage uncertainty. And those are
very difficult concepts and we have not done a good job of explaining
what they are and how we do this process.
But I didn't feel so bad when I reread the 197 rule and the
10 CFR 63 and listened to discussions this morning. They don't know
either what it is, and, sorry, it's not a criticism, but it is meant to
incite some discussion, I hope.
No, they don't. When you hear things like we want a rule on
the 50th percentile of the doses, because it's the expected performance
of the system, and then, on the other hand, you hear statements that we
really can't quantify all the uncertainties, and we really have to go
for something called reasonable assurance or reasonable expectation,
those statements don't go together. We don't understand uncertainty if
we think we can actually do the expected performance of the system and
rule on that.
They don't match. There is some fundamental
misunderstanding of uncertainty.
The other one is, for example, statements in there that
Monte Carlo methods minimize uncertainty, things like that. Those tell
me that there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what uncertainty is
and what we're trying to do for a living here.
So now another premise here was that when I did throw away
the viewgraphs, I threw away a lecture, too, and so that was -- you
won't hear a lecture on uncertainty analysis and how we do it, but I
certainly would like to lead you through a discussion on some of those
issues.
So then I went back to the title of the talk, which I still
felt I was stuck with because that was what Lynn put in the agenda, and
I'll talk about that, what is the role of uncertainty analysis. That
sounded so simple at first, but then when I thought about it, it was
what really is it at the end of the day.
Well, at the end of the day, it defines the meaning of the
answer, that's it. At the end of the day, when DOE gives you a dose
that Abe says they hope would be down in the eight millirems, four
millirems, some tiny number, it's the background to say what does that
number really mean, and that's then role of uncertainty analysis.
And I'd always say in this, if you get confused in all the
terminology and everything else about these kinds of assessment, go to
the end. Go to the answer and say what does it mean, what is somebody
trying to tell me about the site and how did they get there, because to
me, when I think about what the answer means, I can only come up with a
couple of thoughts.
One is it depends on how I got there and it depends on who
took the journey with me. That, to me, is the issue of defining the
answer and treating uncertainty.
So next, I want to get some other very fundamental things
out on the table. This morning you heard some comments that I've seen
before for a long time in this, comments I used to believe, that at the
end of the day, you'll have a technically defensible analysis. At the
end of the day, you'll have complete site characterization. That's what
we'd like. At the end of the day, we'll have, quote-unquote, correct
science, accurate science, and that's what we'll have at the end of the
day and that will be the basis for the decision at Yucca Mountain.
It won't. It won't be. I'm sorry. It's just not going to
be there. What you're going to have is belief. You're going to have
belief, you're going to have expert judgment, you're going to have
engineering judgment, you're going to have scientific inference, but at
the heart of this analysis is belief, not science.
I know we'll get a good argument about that around the table
and I hope to.
But actually I went through a long exercise with another
repository program, doing work all the way from the field, site
characterization work, to ground water modeling, to risk assessment, and
then leading a major public effort in getting their involvement in risk
assessment.
And the answer at the end of the day was fundamentally based
on belief, very little based on science.
Now, is that bad? No. Not in any sense of the word, and
it's not meant to say that.
It's meant to say that when we talk about decisions about
the future, we base them on belief. We certainly try to constrain them
by facts, we try to constrain them by consistency with science, that's
our goal to do those things and to do it well. When we talk about this
frequency of having a car accident, we want to constrain that by what we
know in the past of car accidents. We don't make up the fact that we're
scared today that we'll get in an accident and we won't go out of the
house. We don't do that.
So the two messages are we actually do this process very
similar to any other decision we make about the future and the other
side of that coin is we operate on belief when we talk about the future.
However, when we talk about belief about the future here,
let me point out something, another fundamental flaw that we get into in
thinking in this business, that this idea of probability, we can equate
it to gambling, we can equate it to car wrecks, we can equate dose to
risk. Those are all not true. They're absolutely different concepts.
If you're putting them in the same box, then we're not
playing the same game when we do safety assessments.
We really have to make assumptions about processes over long
timeframes, where we have no independent measurements of those processes
for the long term. We don't have repositories that have operated over
the last 10,000 years that we can go back and get frequency data on how
often they failed, how much they released, where did the stuff go. We
don't have that information.
So we're not playing the game of rolling the dice over and
over and finding out the probability of getting a six or a seven or a
three. That's not the world we live in.
Next, given that, that I fundamentally believe belief is at
the heart of this process, what things can we say about that to address
this issue? You must recognize, as I think Judy said this morning,
quite correctly, belief is a function of bias. I'll believe something
because I'm biased, and I am biased. There's no question about that.
We all sit around this table and have different biases that we bring to
the table.
So that's, to me, why the process has to have this multiple
involvement of people with different biases if we're to come to
conclusions that are meaningful.
The second issue along this line is that believability is a
function of trust. Whether or not I believe Abe and his analysis and
the presentation of these doses, I'll be as honest as I can, relies on a
high degree of how much I believe him as a scientist, as an honest
person, as somebody that I think is out there doing the best job they
can for the country. That's absolutely crucial to the process.
Then, finally, that believability is a function of process.
That is, whether or not I also can believe somebody maybe that I don't
know, like how much access did I have to the process, how much was I
included in the process as we went along toward getting the answer, how
much were my concerns addressed as we went along.
The difficulty here is that the only other option, which no
one has, is to completely do your own site characterization, completely
do your own safety assessment and come to your conclusions.
If you heard the words even at the NRC, they won't be doing
that. They don't have those resources. They essentially will be
relying, to a huge degree, on information collected and analyzed by DOE.
So therefore, the process is the key.
Now, what is that process? Because we've heard some
different takes on that process today. We have heard that our job is to
inform the public. Certainly that's part of it and I would agree. I
would say that informing the public does nothing to build trust, or very
little.
We've heard that our job is to listen to the public. That's
one more step along the path, which is an improvement. We really
haven't heard that we'll include the public. And when I talk about the
concept of including the public, I'll go to the extreme so that it
really makes sense; that is, that somebody in the public raises their
hand and says, you know, this value of this parameter in this model is
wrong and here's why, and DOE changes it or NRC changes it.
That, to me, is inclusion. When you're part of the process,
going along with it, and you raise an issue that somebody doesn't say we
thought about it, we dismissed it for the following reasons, but
absolutely says if we can't refute it, we need to include it, and that
we have a public process that includes that level of discussion and
discourse.
Now, I think historically, being involved in this process,
we kind of had this Aristotle type view that the knowledgeable people
should be making the decisions in this process. What we heard today,
and I think we heard it by one of the ACNW members early on, is the
public is really smart. They aren't what we take them to be, as so
different from us that do the job that we can't explain what we do in a
way that they understand it and then can provide us meaningful input.
When we did an exercise in the project I was involved in, a
lawyer from the state actually changed the way we model colloids. I
won't go into that, but colloids is certainly what we would consider a
very detailed technical issue, a very difficult issue to make people
understand. But he more than understood it, and he more than found out
where the weakness in our argument was and pointed it out to us.
So I don't believe that there is this view that the experts
can make the decisions or need to separately from the public. I believe
the public can be involved in any level that you have the patience and
energy to get them involved.
Now, that also says fundamentally, I haven't decided the
answer, because I don't know what they're going to say. So their bias
comes into the system, with the DOE bias, with the NRC bias, and you
follow a path together, no one predetermining the outcome. To me,
that's a much more solid approach to doing safety assessment.
Now, the other thing I'd like to raise just for discussion
and to make sure that I'm a good target here for Abe -- just kidding, he
was picking on me earlier -- some other common misconceptions about risk
that not only find their way into the analysis, but have found their way
into the regulations.
Number one, that uncertainty increases with time. I don't
know what that means. I've tried and I've tried, and I can't understand
what people that are saying that think they mean. I have listened to
the arguments, I have read all the arguments, and uncertainty does not
increase in time.
Now, the number of things that could occur at the repository
may increase in time. If the window of time gets bigger, I may have to
consider other things that I really believe will happen. Not that I
don't believe, but that I really believe will happen. That's variability
maybe increasing in time, but not my uncertainty.
Next, is a really difficult issue, and that is that when we
talk in safety assessment and you get dazzled in equations and
probability distribution functions and things like that, you get the
feeling that we're spending our time on the largest uncertainties. We
aren't. When humans get to the largest uncertainties, they ignore them.
I'll give you two examples in this business. When we get to
uncertainties that discuss the future projection of populations in the
area, we run from them. We decide that's just too complicated for us,
we can't think like that and we can't project. Now, what do we do? Do
we say, well, then we give up Yucca Mountain because we can't do that,
which would be an option, or do we say we'll standardize it at today's
population? That's the approach taken now.
Second, for example, is the issue that was brought up on how
we actually equate dose and risk. As was eloquently stated this
morning, there's a large body of science that is uncertain that there's
argument about, at low doses, what's the risk. There's people all over
the map on that issue and there's large debates on that issue.
And the approach we have always taken in this business is,
again, to just standardize it and ignore the uncertainty. So our
analysis really doesn't do the full risk calculation that includes the
uncertainty of that information. It says we'll go to this international
committee, who has standardized the relationship, and then, in a
separate room, discusses its uncertainty.
So when you see risk at the end of the day here, we don't
have all the risks in that. We have part of the risks in that. Maybe
we have the most important ones, maybe we don't.
The other final misconception that I really would like to
bring out is that you've heard a lot of discussion this morning of dose
and risk as if they were in some sense equal or you just multiply by
dose and you get a risk.
That has been a misconception in this kind of business.
When we think that way or talk that way, what we're really saying is
that if this glass has a certain concentration of radionuclides in it
and I drink it, then there is a probability I'll die. There's a huge
missing part from that in the Yucca Mountain equation, which is what is
the likelihood it will ever get contaminated, which is actually where
most of the energy is spent in this business; what's the likelihood that
there would be a release from the facility and what's the uncertainty
with where it goes.
So we really don't want to live in that same world and make
sure that you understand the difference. They are not the same at all.
At the end of the day, the Yucca Mountain one should have both of those
in it.
However, at the end of the day, the NRC has standardized the
last one out of it, and EPA, by saying it's 15 millirems or 25
millirems, we really don't go all the way to cancers.
So in closing, I actually had to address the other part of
the title, sorry, but I couldn't change the title then, so I did this.
I will just briefly tell you how we do deal with uncertainty.
That is, first of all, how do we manage risk? The first
effort is to quantify risk. Now, we can't do that in all cases. In
fact, the most fundamental one was discussed this morning, and that is -
- and Abe said it quite well -- is that people are saying, well, those
are all nice equations, those are all nice answers, but give us the big
picture, what can go wrong here.
So if I return to what John Garrick said this morning on how
do we look at this problem, it fits so well to say the first big
question people care about is what can happen at this site, what can go
wrong. That's the first major question.
Well, how do we deal with that? Well, we're back to belief.
We don't have any way to deal with that in some rigorous mathematical or
scientific way. What we really do is get people together to think about
it. We list things that can go wrong, try to be complete as they can,
and then go from there to screen out things that would not occur at
Yucca Mountain.
So the answer there is how do we deal with it? We deal with
it with a process, not with a scientific measurement.
Second of all, how do we quantify risk when it comes to the
performance of the system, once we say something has gone wrong? Well,
the first step in that process, you should all be aware of, is really a
conceptualization. It's not a quantification. It says that I'm a
geologist and I'm a hydrologist and I look at the information and my
concept of the system is that it has so many layers, that those layers
have certain properties, that the boundary conditions, the recharge are
such and such, but that's my concept.
Now, the goal here is that my concept is not inconsistent
with any facts. But the end result is we can have as many conceptual
models of Yucca Mountain as there are people in this room, and, in fact,
certainly from the hydrology community. We always joke that if there's
two hydrologists, we'll have four conceptual models at least.
That's not bad. How do we deal with it, is the question.
Now, how do we deal with that uncertainty is the real issue. Well,
that's a great difficulty in the process, because there has been efforts
to validate those models in the international community, national
community. Those efforts have not succeeded. Valid meaning prove the
model that gives you true results. That's not the world we live in.
But the second one is then how do you assign likelihoods to
each of those? If we really wanted to maintain the rigor of a
probabilistic analysis, and I did work like this for some time until it
just, to me, hit a wall, which was trying to assign beliefs, level of
beliefs to conceptual models, so that I could say this one is more
consistent with the data than this one is, and therefore, I believe this
one more than this one.
At the end of the day, the belief system was just yes or no.
It wasn't degrees of belief. It was either this assumption is right or
wrong, and today I don't have the evidence.
So now I'm left with I have multiple conceptual models, what
do I do with them. That's an issue that's still being wrestled with.
It doesn't have a solution, that I know. I know we've heard terms from
DOE, NRC and others of we'll use the preferred hypothesis, which is the
one we believe. We will certainly hear others from the stakeholders
saying we only want to use the one that gives you the worst answer.
And then the mistaken assumption by some others has been
that that's a conservative model. It is not. Now, there's other ways
to treat that uncertainty, but fundamentally, when you look at the
analysis, at the heart of this is the belief of scientists.
Now, once I've formulated that model, then the next step is
that I would like to define the parameters that go into that model, and
this is where you get this kind of glory and rigor that we really liked
of quantifying uncertainty, where we say that we have measured
parameters in the range and that value is from one value to another and
those of us in the real world realize those orders of magnitude things
are not too shocking, but that is the way we know nature.
The uncertainty, as my direct measurements, have to be
interpreted by an expert to be representative measurements in the model.
That is, I'll measure something literally in this project that has a
diameter of the coffee cup you're holding and then at a minimum scale, I
will infer how that represents this entire room. That's scientific
inference. It's not scientific knowledge. It is essentially belief.
Then the next step in that is to propagate those
uncertainties through to the end. When I propagate those, the first one
essentially -- that is, what can go wrong -- you will see in the
regulations a formal treatment, where I assign a probability of what
will go wrong, what's the probability the climate will change, what's
the probability that volcanism will occur, and then what are the
consequences if it does, in addition to this parameter uncertainty.
So I come up with these things that Abe is absolutely right,
I've never put one up in front of an audience that anyone understands,
which is here is the distribution, the probabilistic distribution of
future doses. Those are difficult to understand.
Once I have done that, the question now is a really
difficult one, which is that we like to live in this world that that's
not the total answer. So we live in a world where DOE, for example, has
produced curve after curve that all comply, and then, in another room
down the hall, talks about going out and measuring things to reduce
uncertainty.
Those don't agree. There is no sense in that. If I
captured uncertainty in the analysis in the first place, then there is
nothing left to measure. If I didn't capture uncertainty in the first
place, then I better be in the room with Abe discussing why those curves
were wrong.
So the questions about how do we reduce uncertainty, first
of all, have to deal with do we need to. We don't reduce uncertainty
just because we like to live with less uncertainty. I may have total
uncertainty about some parameter at Yucca Mountain and it may not
matter.
The other issue with this idea of reducing uncertainty and
managing uncertainty that I feel needs some explanation is, is it
possible to reduce it. There are some things, and, in fact, we live in
a world sometimes that thinks that sensitivity analysis is done on the
answer and we go measure those things. There can be things that are
incredibly sensitive, but I'm not going to change them. But at the end
of the day, I won't change the gravitational constant a bit, but it may
be a very sensitive parameter in the analysis.
So those are the questions that need to be faced as we go
forward. First of all, did we get to an answer that's defensible; that
is, shows compliance and shows it with confidence. If so, my position
is we're done.
If we go to an answer that doesn't comply, though, and here
is the other side of the coin, it doesn't mean it's a bad site. It may
mean we haven't reduced uncertainty enough yet and that the goal should
be to focus our resources on showing why that analysis is not valid, is
not consistent with the information.
So that is all. You can have my viewgraphs, if you want
them, but they have nothing to do with what I just said.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks a lot, Paul. That's a pretty candid --
I don't want to say -- maybe stark discussion of uncertainty and you
talked a lot about belief and assumptions and bringing together a lot of
different biases and credibility, also, of the scientists and you
brought us back to process and not just informing, educating, but the
process where the public can influence the result.
And we're going to start our discussion with a member of the
committee, Dr. Wymer, but I guess I would ask everybody to keep the
question in mind and including Paul in terms of examples from his
experience, is there -- how do you design a process that allows
influence around these particular issues.
But let's go to Dr. Wymer. I'm glad that Bill lent you his
name tent, since it would be hard for you to turn yours upside down, but
go ahead.
DR. WYMER: I'm not exactly sure what I am to respond to
here. I've heard more than -- probably more than I understand. I'm not
an expert on uncertainty in these processes. I leave that more to the
chairman, John Garrick.
Am I supposed to be responding specifically to --
MR. CAMERON: I have to apologize. I saw that Bill's card
was up in front of you and I thought that you wanted to say something,
but I think it's Mr. Vasconi who wants to say something.
DR. WYMER: I don't think you really meant that, but that's
a gracious out and I thank you.
MR. CAMERON: All right.
MR. VASCONI: I am uncertain who is going to buy me lunch,
but I am certain I'm hungry.
MR. CAMERON: Bill always gets to the bottom line. Thanks,
Bill. Mal?
MR. MURPHY: Just a couple of quick points. I thought that
as an excellent presentation. I don't think anyone -- I mean, certainly
I have never labored under the misassumption that belief was not an
integral part of or an overwhelmingly large part of this decision. But
it's always been our position that that belief be informed by good
science.
And just to take the coffee cup example, for example, if
you're trying to determine the volume in this room by measuring a coffee
cup or more than one coffee cup, our position is that you measure the
right coffee cup or a sufficient number of correct coffee cups and that
you measure them accurately. And we do have some control over those
variables that go into the ultimate conclusion.
And then based on the correct decision as to which coffee
cup to measure and an accurate measurement of that coffee cup, sure, we
agree that you then form a scientific inference as to a belief with
respect to the volume of area in the room.
Bias, sure, biases are fine. Everybody's got biases. You
can't completely remove biases from processes such as these, but I think
even Paul acknowledged that the bias is fine as long as it is apparent
or transparent, as long as it's acknowledged by everyone, and so long as
the ultimate decision takes those biases into account.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Mal. Paul, after we hear Abe and
Judy, we may come back to you to see if you have some comments on what
they said. Abe?
MR. VAN LUIK: Judy actually had her flag up before me.
MS. TREICHEL: I always do.
MR. VAN LUIK: And we'll have --
MR. CAMERON: It's an interesting relationship you got.
MR. VAN LUIK: I must complain that Paul both preempted and
destroyed the talk I was going to give this afternoon. So I have to ask
for a full lunch hour so I can re-prepare.
MR. CAMERON: All right. Judy?
MS. TREICHEL: Everybody's pretty obsessed with lunch. I
really enjoyed your presentation and one of the reasons I did was
because it seemed much more honest, I believe it was more honest than a
lot of the presentations that I hear, and I hear a great many.
To me, there is a contradiction between the things that you
brought out, which I enjoyed hearing, that decisions are made on the
basis of belief and that involves a certain amount of trust in the
belief, and that uncertainty can't always be reduced.
And if I hear that, at the same time that Bill Reamer is
saying that DOE must prove the public is protected, DOE will require
that -- or NRC will require that DOE prove.
Well, if decisions are based on belief, trust, and an
acknowledgement that there's a lot of uncertainty out there, I don't
know who gets -- who accepts proof or to whom it's being proven.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Let's keep that question on the table
for people to address. Bill?
MR. PHILLIPS: I have to agree with Judy completely. I
think that it's impossible to prove anything in these ways. I think
that your presentation was absolutely magnificent and I agreed with
every single word of myself, as a scientist.
One of the problems that I've had even as an instructor in
the universities is that in an age of computers, where we have computer
models, a lot of times the students and even the public confuse computer
models and predictions with data.
And we really will not have any data on Yucca Mountain as to
the thermal loading and volcanism and the down-range types of things
temporally until we put fuel rods in there. Until spent fuel goes into
that mountain and we measure what's coming out of that mountain,
everything else is just supposition. We can do our best to try to cover
ourselves and "what if" ourselves to death.
As a hobby, I build experimental helicopters and I test fly
them and when I walk around a helicopter with a micrometer and I spin it
up and I balance the blades and I do everything I possibly can to
guarantee that I'm going to live through a test flight, what it boils
down to in the end is I've made every measurement I can, but I don't
have the empirical evidence. I have not run the experiment.
And we're not going to have any kind of evidence in the long
term to answer most of these questions until we run the experiment, if
we ever do run an experiment.
What it boils down to in most experiments is that you get
into that helicopter with belief and you take off in it, because you
think you've covered yourself. You may have, you may not have, but
there is no computer models, there's nothing that you can "what if" to
take the place of true empirical data.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Bill, for that analogy. I was going
to ask if everybody who was pretty impressed with Paul's presentation,
it was very illuminating about what goes on, and I guess the question
is, and we're going to go to Robert next, but the question is what do we
do about all this.
Robert?
MR. HOLDEN: I enjoyed the uncertainties and the certainty,
as well. A few years ago, actually it was here in Vegas, I was talking
with someone, a scientist, who was -- we were talking about cultural
impacts and the things that the native peoples in this area believe.
And as a scientist, I asked him, well, you cannot
necessarily prove them, but is it a scientist's job to disprove, because
true science leaves all options open, in my understanding. I'm not a
scientist, of course. But it leaves all options open; that there is
still the possibility that these things exist, these relationships exist
and these spirits and these things that have been here for thousands of
years and interact with the people there do exist.
So they're out there and we believe them. We believe them
beyond the shadow of a doubt, and I believe as -- and we believe that
belief has kept us in existence for all these years, regardless of
whether it's in Nevada or in Oklahoma or in Mississippi or whatever part
of the world indigenous people come from.
But in terms of ambiguities, there is something that's had
its origination in the law regarding Indian cases, Federal cases, and
that's that all ambiguities are to be held in favor of the Indians.
Basically, what that says is that because it's a foreign
law, because the laws of the United States and the courts of the United
States, the issues with Indian nations resolved in these foreign courts
basically, foreign to us, it's their law, it's their language and so
forth and their interpretation, that if there was something that was
ambiguous, it's to be resolved in favor of the Indians, because
obviously we didn't understand those things.
So that comes and goes. That's sort of like a political
statement that some Supreme Court Justice uses now and then, if they
want to do the right thing.
But I guess that brings me to what I'm saying is that if
there is something ambiguous, if there is something that is uncertain,
that that uncertainty is resolved in the favor of the DOE people in
terms of progress, in terms of proceeding.
If there is a view in the minds of the people that here are these
interpretations, and, as was said, there are experts and you can get
experts on both sides of the fence and in the middle if you want, just
depends on who you pay for and who is paying them perhaps, but I guess
those things that people want to accept that is that these things may
not be safe or should not proceed, that ambiguity, that uncertainty is
resolved in favor of proceeding, it seems.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Robert. I guess the analogy is one
that if you're going to be conservative in terms of the scientific
conclusions, to be conservative, in a sense, in terms of this important
belief system in resolving any uncertainties in favor of what would not
negatively impact the indigenous people.
Fred.
MR. DILGER: Thanks, Chip. I have to apologize for being
late today. We were actually shuffling different Commissioners around
this morning, and so our entire staff has been pretty tied up.
But I want to speak to your point about how to actually
implement this and one of the things that we don't see is we don't see
Paul's comments taken into consideration when we get down to regulatory
documents, like the draft environmental impact statement, like the
generic environmental impact statement for nuclear power licensing
renewal that the NRC recently released.
The issues of -- one of the persistent criticisms of risk
analysis in the past has been that uncertainty is not documented and
expressed clearly in the risk assessments and here, again, we -- Paul's
information doesn't appear in the DEIS, certainly not in the
transportation section.
I think there is probably a disconnect there that deserves
some comment.
MR. CAMERON: We're going to go to Dr. Garrick next, but at
least for a starting point in terms of processes, express and document
uncertainty and when you look at some of the regulatory documents, you
don't see any expression of that uncertainty, which would at least be a
starting point.
Dr. Garrick.
DR. GARRICK: I have to first say that this is a wonderful
experience of observing different perspectives that people give on
specific issues.
I suspect that most of the people in this room would view
what Paul says about risk assessment as a bashing or a negative on risk
assessment, whereas my perspective on it was quite the opposite, and I
just wanted to make that observation.
I think that the seasoned and genuine practitioner of risk
assessment would not disagree with some of the fundamental observations
that Paul said, and yet I suspect that there's a lot of people that
believe quite the opposite.
The whole issue of uncertainty is one of the reasons that
risk assessment came into being. It was an attempt to get explicit
rather than implicit about measures of safety, measures of risk. And
when I look upon the industries that have employed this concept in the
most aggressive manner and I see the impact that it's had on those
industries, obviously I get very encouraged about the progress that has
been made.
The whole concept of reactor safety has been revolutionized
by application of probabilistic risk assessment. Our ignorance level
has been reduced tremendously in terms of what has -- what are really
the underlying drivers of the safety of nuclear power plants, and it's
been manifested not just on paper, but it's been manifested in an
industry that has quietly and somewhat without pounding on their chest
become perhaps the safest industry of all time.
So I think that the focus really maybe ought to be on what
it has provided rather than what it hasn't accomplished, and what it has
provided is a process by which we can develop insights into the safety
of complex systems, unlike we've ever been able to do so in the past.
And when people talk about that we don't talk about the
uncertainties, part of the problem of that is institutional. In the
early application of probabilistic risk assessment, most of the energy
was given to displaying the uncertainties associated with the parameters
that characterize the critical measures of risk.
Part of the reason that the emphasis on displaying the
uncertainties in the risk parameters was diminished was because of the
complaint that the uncertainty could not be understood and that we need
to go back to point estimates and what have you.
So I think there is this continuous problem of trying to
decide the best format for getting public understanding and public
acceptance, if you wish, of the process, on the one hand, and providing
the necessary tools and analytical processes to have confidence in the
numbers on the other hand.
But I just couldn't let the topic or the discussion go
without commenting that my -- I was not disturbed by anything that Paul
said. I have been preaching a lot of the same things as far as
application of probabilistic risk assessment.
Chances are, I have probably been involved in more real
world applications than anybody in this room and maybe everybody
combined. So I'm not talking about this as a zealot or an advocate of
probabilistic risk assessment, but as a practitioner that has seen a
very chaotic situation change into a much more visible and organized
process that has served, in my judgment, mankind extremely well.
And we have a long ways to go. We are talking about a
physical system here that is unlike that has been analyzed before. I
have been spending the last three weeks heavily involved in trying to
use the same techniques to decide how the space shuttle should be
upgraded. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration for many
years was a strong opponent of probabilistic methods and have just, in
the last few years, begun to be one of the most active and principal
users of the thought process, and I think it is helping a great deal to
give us the added confidence in that program as well.
So I think that the practitioners would say, well, okay, it
has its problems, what are the alternatives. If there's an alternative
that's going to do the job better, obviously we ought to be scientists
enough to accept it and to jump on board.
But at the same time, the evidence has been
overwhelming in terms of the contribution that is made to
the safety of complex systems in all fields, in shipping, in
chemical processing, in refineries, in pipelines, in just
about everything we have done.
So I think we want to acknowledge that this is a discipline
that's imperfect, but it's the best we have at the present time, and the
focus ought not to be on so much what's wrong with it, but what's right
with it and how we can make it better.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you very much, Dr. Garrick, for the
benefit of your years of experience on that. We're going to take one
more card up here, and go to the audience for a few minutes, and I guess
I would just leave you with the question over lunch, except for Abe and
Bob, who are going to be trying to redo their presentation.
But is there anything that the ACNW, in its unique role,
should do in regard to the use of this tool to make sure that all of the
value is brought out?
Ray, do you want to give us a last comment? And maybe I
should allow Paul to say something after you talk.
MR. CLARK: It's hard to follow Dr. Garrick on this
discussion. But I was just going to say our concept of reasonable
expectation, and I don't want to talk for Bill Reamer, but my
understanding of reasonable assurance, as well, I think we agree in the
aspect that proof is not to be had. This is what Judy said, in the
sense of -- well, whatever the sense of proof means.
But, yes, indeed, there is a factor of belief that comes
into both concepts. Bill said, well, no, no, I'm interpreting now what
Bill said, when he said proof, I suspect he meant convincing the
Commission or whoever will do the licensing that it's licensable or non-
licensable, whatever.
Another comment that I heard Paul say, at least I think I
did, was that EPA doesn't go all the way to cancer. It just set a dose
limit, is that --
MR. DAVIS: No. I meant to say that you don't propagate
uncertainty all the way to there.
MR. CLARK: Okay. I'm --
MR. DAVIS: You relate dose to cancer based on the linear
non-threshold model, without addressing the uncertainty in that model.
MR. CLARK: I'm not the expert in our group for that. I
don't know how to take that into account. Okay.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Ray. Paul, do you have any final
words for us before we go out to the audience?
MR. DAVIS: Actually, after the nice compliments, I really
just should keep my mouth shut, I think. But I don't want to leave a
misunderstanding and John Garrick raised some very interesting issues.
Put the whole talk into perspective. My title is I'm a
department manager, the department is called Environmental Risk and
Decision Analysis. It is what I do for a living.
The points I was trying to bring out is why I think in some
of the areas we're doing it wrong. Not to ever reverse what we're doing
in risk. To me, that just -- I'll say that one of my religions is risk
in the treatment of probability and treating it the right way.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you very much, Paul. Thank you for that
presentation. We have had two presentations since we have visited you
in the audience and we have a few minutes before we go to lunch.
Anybody on this side have any comments or questions? All right. Let's
go over here and see -- let's go to Mary.
MS. MANNING: I'm Mary Manning, and I'm speaking as a
citizen, not as a reporter, right this minute. I'm also a Ph.D.
candidate and public participation is my topic. This is one of the
things that has driven me insane over the last 15 years over this
particular issue, Yucca Mountain. My master's thesis was an analysis of
the ethics or lack of ethics in Yucca Mountain.
I have a couple of things to follow up on what Paul Davis
said, which I think were very important. The sociologist Kai Erickson,
in his studies of risk assessment and how people perceive risks, said a
very profound thing in one of his papers, and this sentence has not left
me since I read it.
That is, public perception is as real as scientific fact.
And what I would like to discuss with Mr. Davis, because you did give
the knowledgeable citizen, the lawyer that came and changed the way you
were thinking, same thing happened in a civil action. A lawyer went out
and figured out Darcy's Law and figured out how the aquifer could be
contaminated under those factories.
What I'd like to find out is how the citizen participates in
this process to the very end and has a voice at the table at the end.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Mary. It's an issue that can be
addressed by all of you at some point during the day. Paul, do you have
any answer or any thoughts on Mary's question right at this point or do
you want to think about it?
MR. DAVIS: I actually think it would be a good topic to
introduce in this evening's discussion, if she's going to be present.
MR. CAMERON: Great. Okay. Let's hold that and, Mary,
we'll go you then. Sally?
MS. DEVLIN: I just have a quickie. At the last NWGRB
meeting, the verbiage that Lake Barrett used was assumed uncertainty.
Now, that got to me. I don't -- and I asked for an explanation and, of
course, I got none.
And as the public, and I've been hearing this for all these
years, when I see your numbers and when I this and when I that, the one
in a million, I'm not going to be that million. The one in 10,000, the
five kids that are going to die of cancer, this and that and the next
thing.
In the EPA Federal Register, they talk about 20,000 people
are going to die of cancer deaths and only 5,000 from this project.
Now, I rather resent that and I think it should be addressed. I don't
believe in assumed uncertainty.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you very much, Sally. And I think Ray
noted that comment from Sally. Grant?
MR. HUDLOW: I'd like to thank Lynn from the start of this,
mentioning something about the process. Of course, she's talking about
getting public involvement, that's the way you get trust from the
public. Telling the public that you're going to take care of all the
safety issues and when you don't have the resources to do that is the
way you get distrust from the public.
And I think -- I don't know whether any of you have watched
any of the Peter Drucker seminars or not, but the number one rule is
that if you're going to inform somebody of something, they're not
listening. If you ask them what they think and how we can do it better
and whether it needs to be done and so forth, you're going to get
comments like, well, I think we ought to put an outhouse out in the
middle of Highway 160, of course, that's the first comments you get.

Then you have to go on from there and keep probing deeper
and deeper and deeper. It's not something that you can do without
practicing. It's not something you can read a book and do it. It means
it's something that you have to go out and actually do it.
I practice by using the two-foot rule. Lynn got a kick out
of that. When I'm working on something that I need public input and I
need their trust, I tell everybody within two feet what I think about it
and ask them and so forth. Eventually, by looking at their eyes, I'll
see, ah, I said that right, and then I don't have to listen to, hey,
wait a minute, Grant, you've got to think about that.
But that's the -- the principal that we're talking about is
the process that's missing here except for what Paul said. Paul is
hitting right in the middle of that.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you very much, Grant. Let's go over to
this gentleman right here. Just make sure you identify yourself for the
transcript.
MR. McCULLUM: I'm Rod McCullum. I work at the Nuclear
Energy Institute. We are the nuclear industry's trade association. I
came here from Washington today, as I often do, over the last eight
months to hear these meetings, and I guess that kind of makes me the bad
guy.
I really appreciated everything that I've heard so far about
beliefs and uncertainty and we -- and processes to address those. We in
the nuclear industry, of course, believe that the arguments in favor of
the repository, that doing this repository is the right thing to do, are
quite compelling and that they're in things like the viability
assessment and the environmental impact statement.
Of course, that's what we would believe. We're the nuclear
power industry. Would you expect us to say anything else? And we know
a lot of people believe otherwise, and that is typical of every decision
that this nation has to make.
The reason people have different beliefs is because people
have different values. We in the nuclear industry happen to think that
providing electricity for 20 percent of this nation is a very noble
thing to do. Others may believe differently about that technology,
certainly.
But that's why we have something in this country called
democracy. Democracy is really the most effective process the world has
ever come up with for addressing the different beliefs of people who
will and should have different values.
And all of the agencies that you're seeing represented up
here, from the NRC to the EPA, to the grass roots organizations, are all
functions of that democratic process. These meetings and these meetings
we continue to have are functions of those democratic processes.
This is a very serious national decision we're undertaking
and that's why we have so many of these meetings. So I think that when
we're groping for a process out there, I think a process does exist and
I think we are employing that process. And we don't know what the
answer is going to be. Obviously, we in the nuclear industry know how
we'd like to see it come out, but we're concerned. It's not a done
deal, we know that and I know that from being inside Washington.
This process does need to continue and it does need to
continue to address these issues. However, one thing I'd like to point
out here is that in spite of all this, in spite of all these questions,
some of which will have answers, some of which will not have answers,
none of which will have answers everybody likes or believes, the fact
that we're asking the questions is in itself very meaningful.
On this project, we are endeavoring to do something that
mankind has never done before. We are talking about protecting future
generations of people 10,000 years in the future. Granted, it's a
hazard, it's a hazard that makes us think that. Our belief about the
nuclear hazard.
But there are other things we're putting into this world and
other things we're doing to our environment. We don't even ask the
questions.
So it is a very good thing that these questions are being
answered and these questions are being debated in this democratic
process. No matter what the answer comes out to be, I think it's
important to remember that this country has not gotten to be the nation
that it is and that the city has not gotten to be the city that it is,
and the state has not gotten to be the state that it is by failing to
act and by failing to make decisions in the face of uncertainty.
Thank you.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you very much, Rod. We're going to take
a break for lunch. We're a little bit behind, but given the subject and
the amount of participants, I don't think that that's a problem. We can
always go a little bit later this afternoon. Maybe Bob and Abe will
come back and wave the white flag, I don't know.
But I think that you should all be heartened. I was struck
by how much all of you are listening to each other in the conversation,
not only around the table, but in the audience, so that's great.
I have 12:45. How about -- do you want an hour? Okay. Be
back at 1:45. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 12:45 p.m., the meeting was recessed, to
reconvene at 1:45 p.m., this same day.]. A F T E R N O O N S E S S I O N
[1:45 p.m.]
MR. CAMERON: We're a little bit behind, but I still think
we're doing well with the schedule. But I would like to make up some
time, if we could, because for those of you who don't know it, there is
a public meeting tonight with the advisory committee members and we're
sort of short with the audience in terms of question opportunities this
afternoon.
Be assured that we can make all that up tonight, hopefully
you'll be able to be with us. But we still will go out, but I guess the
biggest motivation to get done on time is Mal Murphy said that he was
going to come up here and take over for me. And we don't want that.
The only consensus that we'll arrive at today.
MR. MURPHY: Only if you encroach as much on my dinner hour
as you did on my lunch hour.
MR. CAMERON: Food is important. Okay. Sorry about that.
Well, let's get rolling with Bob Andrews and Abe Van Luik of DOE about
determining what elements of the safety assessment are most important,
managing uncertainty, making results understandable.
Abe, Bob?
MR. ANDREWS: With that title, can you see why I felt a
little bit both preempted and undercut by Paul Davis? Basically, I have
no problem with what Paul said. There are certain nuances of what he
said that I think need some airing, but as he himself said, there wasn't
time to do that.
In the interest of time, I'm willing to forego any questions
or comments.
MR. CAMERON: Now?
MR. VAN LUIK: From the context of what was said this
morning, it's obvious that what I had focused on to talk about in my few
minutes that I'm going to then pass over to Bob for a few minutes, was I
was going to talk about process and it's already been pointed out very
clearly that you've got to have more than process.
Process is something required, process is something that can
help you, but society has to make a decision in the face of uncertainty;
there is no way that you can resolve some of that uncertainty, a lot of
that uncertainty.
One thing that Paul said that I found interesting, because I
have observed it myself, that as repository programs do work, the
uncertainty actually goes up. But we shouldn't forget that the
knowledge base also goes up.
If you look at the work that we were doing back in 1985, we
were very sure of ourselves because we had made assumptions and we were
modeling those assumptions. Now that we have data, observations, and
some data that counters some of the observations, we have -- yes, we
have introduced uncertainty, but we have also introduced a lot more
complexity and specificity to the problem.
But what does DOE need to do? And Bob will get to some of
the nitty-gritty, but as an overarching thing, we need to ourselves have
confidence in the evaluations that we're doing. When I was in Bob's
position many years ago as the M&O PA manager, I got myself in hot water
by saying to the analyst, if you believe your own calculations, you're
in the wrong place. And what I meant by belief was that the bottom line
that fell out of those calculations, that it could be reality.
The point of doing the calculations at that time was to gain
insight and to see where we would go for more information, and I think
we have moved a little ways beyond that now, because we're moving
towards making a determination of whether or not this is a safe thing to
do, and society makes that decision. DOE makes the recommendation.
We need to be able to communicate the results of our work
and also communicate the fact that we have confidence and the basis for
that confidence, and that is kind of the whole hierarchy of things that
Paul Davis was talking about. We have to state a safety case, which is
more than just a safety assessment. There is a total system performance
assessment, however, within that safety case. That total system
performance assessment uses models, data, analysis and judgments all
rolled up together.
The safety case includes a robust repository system concept,
with a demonstrable margin of safety, something that should be
demonstrable outside of the realm of quantitative calculations. There
should be something intuitive about the way that things fall together.
I think Paul pointed out correctly that your first step in modeling is
to look at the system you're dealing with and conceptually model it.
This is how it works and then the mathematics and all the data and the
other things come in.
A lot of times, as the data come in, you revise your
conceptual models and you eventually, for some data, you have competing
conceptual models that you just can't decide which one is correct, and
so you include them both.
But there is a process involved here that gives us some
confidence.
The safety assessment must be comprehensive. Paul also
talked about that, talked about comprehensiveness in terms of features,
events and processes and making sure that enough people have come in
with their biases to give you a good feel that you're complete.
Need to include a well defined assessment approach and you
have to ensure transparent and traceable analyses. You have to
evaluate, not just make a declaration of confidence, you have to
evaluate the basis for having confidence in those models that
significantly contribute to the demonstration of safety.
You have to disclose the uncertainty in present knowledge,
including showing that opposing views have been considered. And you
have to identify and discuss potential approaches to addressing the
remaining uncertainty, if that is possible and if that is necessary.
But there is more to it than just being comprehensive. It
must also be documented so as to illustrate the system and its
components and discuss importance of components to safety.
This is a long speech on traceability and transparency, but what we have
learned over the years, I think, and I think the TSPA/VA is the best
example, is that you have to make your arguments in such a way that they
can be logically thought through and walked through. You can't just
write the document the way that the calculation is actually performed.
You have got to show people what your system looks like, what the
conceptual basis is, and what the technical basis is for doing the work
that actually leads to a result.
Now, one of the things that we're to talk about here, or at
least grope about, is communicating not only the safety case that you're
making, but the confidence, the degree of confidence and the basis for
that confidence. We have found, and I think most other worldwide
programs have found that you have to have a hierarchy of documentation.
I said this morning that Bill Reamer is basically saying
that we're going to be tough, we're going to be thorough, we're going to
be independent, et cetera. I personally welcome that and this is
something I think we can deal with, because we ourselves know how to be
tough, independent thinkers and do the work in such a way that people
will agree with us that that was the right thing to do and that they
will agree with the results, although there are always variations of
belief and legitimate variations of opinion.
But there's a non-technical audience and we usually say the
non-technical audience is the public. The non-technical audience is
also our management within DOE at the higher levels. They may be
scientists, but often they're also political appointees who are not.
A very important non-technical audience is the decision-
makers in the governments at all levels, all the way from Indian tribes
and counties, through states to the Federal level. So there is a lot of
opportunity to talk to people not only -- I think the normal public,
when they see a notice for this type of meeting, they say, hey, I've got
a life and there is something playing over at the X and we'll go there.
But these other audiences who are non-technical are very
interested because their careers could be on the line for the decision
that's coming up. Other things make them very interested. Their
constituencies could be very interested, they could be affected. Their
business holdings could be affected.
So we have to write in terms of people who are really
interested. So the level of complexity that we use in that non-
technical writing can be pretty deep.
Now, we are attempting to meet this challenge basically by
writing a hierarchy of documentation and, also, we are moving into the
world of multimedia presentations, where we will have, for example,
films or little movies that show how a process actually works and what
the result would be of an expanding plume or expanding heat output, and
we are looking at creating a simple system simulator that, in a meeting
such as this, we could set up at a table and people would be able to
walk through it themselves, if they know how it works, or someone could
walk with them and they could say, well, what if it rains three times as
much, we could plug that in and see what the outcome would be.
That way people get an intuitive feel through illustrations
of what the system would look like and feel like. Those must not,
however, ever take the place of the formal compliance argument that we
make to demonstrate safety. You can't cartoon your way through
licensing, in other words.
I think I've probably said way more than I should have, but
the point is that we're acutely aware of the need to communicate. I
realize, as the gentleman to my left, who is no longer there, said, that
there should be more than just communicating, there should also be an
involvement.
Frankly, I am all ears, because I do not know how to
legitimately involve public in the kinds of decision-making that goes
into formulating and running a model. It just escapes me at the moment.
I think the examples that were used before, where someone had an idea of
how to model a process differently, that's a wonderful example, but the
few places where I have seen public involvement in decision-making that
then went into modeling, I would say that the product that was created
was probably okay for the public that was involved, but basically it
introduced other problems such as that the logic flow was interrupted,
but these things were thrown in to basically, I think, in some way, to
buy off the public, making them believe they were involved, as long as
the result was not exceeding some kind of a predetermined outcome.
In other words, I'm just as jaundiced as any other member of
the public about how you would do this in such a way that it would be
genuine and if you got some ideas, I'm listening.
Thank you.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Abe.
MR. ANDREWS: Let me try to build on what Abe said and try
to -- one of the advantages we have of going after lunch is everybody is
full and satisfied and not necessarily looking at their watches. But
also we can benefit from the discussions that occurred this morning and
try to build off of those, especially in the free-for-all forum that's
been specified in this presentation.
Normally, of course, we have 20 or 30 viewgraphs, and, in
fact, we did have 20 or 30 viewgraphs that we were ready to go with, but
--
MR. VAN LUIK: Thirty-four, I think.
MR. CAMERON: But reason told us that was not the best way
to go forward, so we come with zero. But we learned a lot, we learned a
lot this morning, and I think that the department and the contracting
team, the labs, the USGS, learned a lot on some of these aspects that
are germane to the discussion here with respect to risk, risk
communication, uncertainty, uncertainty communication, within the
viability assessment and the subsequent release of that and comments
received during its production, comments received after its release.
A lot of those comments were from people around these tables
or agencies that they represent and we had, of course, our own internal
comments, a wide range of them, not only the labs and the GS reviewing
the work that went into the viability assessment, but an independent
peer review panel that provided some 150 pages of comments on the -- not
only the scientific underpinning for certain assumptions, beliefs, if
you will, that formed the basis for the performance assessment within
the viability assessment, but also how that scientific basis and the
uncertainty in that scientific basis was propagated through the system
to ultimately come up with this curve or family of curves that relate to
-- in the viability assessment, it was dose that was the performance
measure that was addressed.
And there's a number of other reviews, expert elicitations
that were used to probe the validity of the science in particular
aspects of the system. Steve, this morning, had four slides, two of
which were taken from the viability assessment. The first one that he
had up there showed all the myriad -- myriad is maybe not the right
word, but the number of individual processes, individual components,
those features and a number of events that can impact the long-term
isolation of waste at the Yucca Mountain facility.
Each of those components on that slide has a certain bit of
science that underpins it. Some of that science is laboratory-based,
some of that science is field-based. Is there uncertainty in every one
of those boxes on Steve's first viewgraph? Yes. Was that uncertainty
addressed in the VA? In most cases. Not in every case was the
uncertainty in every one of those boxes fully addressed.
And I think a large number of the reviewers pointed out
those areas where either, A, the scientific underpinning for some of
those assumptions, some of those models was insufficient at the time of
the VA to make reasoned assessments of whether that was a valid or
appropriate model for use in a long-term projection of ultimately to
dose, and, B, in some cases, they identified areas where uncertainties
in that particular model or part of the system may not have been fully
and adequately addressed.
In some cases, they thought the uncertainty was larger than
what was being addressed in the VA models, and, in many cases, they
thought it was smaller. They thought there was more understanding than
the uncertainty that was being addressed.
So I think we've tried to go forward with the comments that
we have received, the comments received from NRC, the comments we have
received from ACNW, from TRB, the other comments are more or less coming
in with respect to the draft environmental impact statement, which also
used, as a basis for long-term post-closure projections of dose, the
same models. It was the same basis as used in the viability assessment.
So comments received on the draft environmental statement will help make
the scientific basis and the approach for incorporating uncertainties
into the future work, including the site recommendation analyses, I
think, more transparent and traceable.
That brings me to the last part of the transparency and
traceability issue. That is and remains still -- and I think it's
embodied in what we're talking about here, the communication aspect.
One of the major challenges, to document in a way that is clearly
understandable, not only the technical basis for every single assumption
for every single component, but how all of those assumptions, and with
their corresponding technical basis, propagate through the system for
all the varying barriers, of water contacting waste, and ultimately for
waste leaving the repository, and to do that in a clearly demonstrable
way.
We tried some things in the VA to do that, some of those
worked, some of those didn't work. We're continually evaluating, as Abe
pointed out, graphical ways of depicting this and for varying audience
that would portray how we believe the system performs and how those
uncertainties are used.
I do want to point out that the issue of uncertainty and how
you're addressing them and how do you quantify them and how do you
determine something is important; in the VA, we use a number of
different techniques to evaluate what was important and those techniques
essentially resulted in a prioritization of work that was documented
within the viability assessment and, in fact, is the basis for the
department's and moving forward with additional scientific
investigations at the labs and in the field.
In addition to those individual analyses, which are
more quantitative-based, there was an understanding by all
of us that that was necessary, but not sufficient to define
the full range of possible uncertainty and full basis for
prioritizing work forward.
So there were, in fact, some after the fact, in addition to
the quantitative analyses, some judgments, some beliefs of the
scientists working on the project, but taking into consideration
comments received from external bodies and internal reviewers of how
work should be prioritized to address those uncertainties, and I think
that's a rational way to move forward, not to base it solely on a wide
family of curves, but incorporate some of those beliefs or judgments
into the assessment of what makes a difference, what is significant to
performance.
So with that, I'll stop also and have some discussion, I
guess.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Abe. Thanks, Bob. I think you
covered a lot of ground in terms of substantive aspects of actually
performing a safety assessment, for example, the prioritization. Both
of you, I think, talked about some of the attributes of making the
safety case comprehensive, transparent, traceable, documentation, the
need to communicate.
Abe sort of hit the process, underlined the process element,
again, which goes back to what Paul was talking about, how important
process is and how can the public not only be informed, but influence
the process, have some confidence in the decision-making that's being
done.
Do we want to start with trying to examine the process
question? Remember Mary's question, related question from this morning.
Is there a way that the public can be more meaningfully involved in the
safety assessment process? Dr. Garrick.
DR. GARRICK: I don't have the answer. I just have a thought, a
suggestion, based on experience. This question of how to involve the
public in the performance assessment process, in a risk assessment and a
safety assessment is a question that is being addressed in all arenas,
where they're trying to employ more quantitative methods.
I just want to mention one specific application, where they
went a little further than what I've seen in some cases. You're all
familiar, of course, with the Exxon Valdez event and the tremendous
impact that had on the shipping industry and the oil industry, and they,
following that accident, made the decision to upgrade their approach to
safety assessment and called on the risk assessment community for help.
And the underlying objective here was to involve
stakeholders and I am not proposing this as a model, but it might be
something you ought to look into. So they organized a stakeholder
steering committee that really was well represented by all of the people
that were impacted, affected by, even interested in the shipment of oil
from Alaska down the coast or elsewhere, and the consequence of this was
to do the first of a kind comprehensive risk assessment of the Prince
William Sound.
And this was a major step and change in the whole culture of
the shipping industry, of the oil industry, in terms of how to do safety
assessment. So they were very eager to want to do it right.
And the steering committee that was put together was made up
of all elements of society, including tribal nations and they
essentially met with the risk assessment team and on a frequent basis,
not only reviewed what was going on, but participated in the whole
process of the kind of model, the kind of analysis that was to be
performed.
Now, I don't know, I'm sure there are other examples of
where there were major attempts to exercise public participation in
something as abstract and complex as probabilistic risk assessment, but
this is one I'm aware of and it was rather successful and it's something
that could be of help.
MR. CAMERON: That's an excellent idea. People often think
that the wheel hasn't been invented somewhere else, but maybe we should
follow this thread.
Are there other -- I'll call it a model, just for a
shorthand term. Are there other models that have been developed in
other areas that people know about and what are your thoughts about a
stakeholder steering committee? I mean, we've heard about the peer
review, expert elicitation.
We have expert technical advisory committees. What about
something that was used, as Dr. Garrick pointed out, in the Exxon
Valdez. Comments on this. Judy?
MS. TREICHEL: I always seem to be in charge of cold water,
but I have really serious thoughts about stakeholder advisory group or
whatever you wanted to call it.
In the case of the Exxon Valdez and in the case of many of
the Defense facilities around the country where there have been
radioactive messes left, everybody agreed they wanted those messes
cleaned up and the people at Prince Edward Sound all had a common goal.
There is not, at Yucca Mountain, a common goal and one of the problems
that we have is that you're attacking this problem with public
involvement at the back end, at the end of the train, and people --
we're now dealing just daily, almost 24 hours a day with people trying
to do their comments on the draft EIS.
And one of the very difficult things is that this is a lousy
EIS and it's partially lousy because of the way Congress set it up with
no need to consider the need. And everybody says, well, but how do you
make a decision if you don't even determine whether you need a
repository. Well, that's all water over the dam, as are a few other
things.
So in discussing whether or not people will be here this
evening, I doubt that there will. If there is a notice that says come
on out and hear the NRC, that's probably not any more attractive than a
notice for a church that you don't want to go to.
There has to be something shown where, when people come,
when they get a babysitter, when they put aside something else that they
really want to do and they come out, that something is going to happen
because they did that and there is nothing to show that and the fact
that we've got people sitting here at the table who actually represent
other people saying that we all know we can't change this, we all know
that this is going to happen anyway and maybe we want benefit, that's
not good enough.
If that idea is prevalent, and it certainly isn't here, I
will never accept that. I think this thing is going down, but agree
with me or not, but I don't put any stock in that opinion. But if other
people do, I don't see any reason in the world why they would come and
play a part in either something they don't want or something that they
can have absolutely no influence in business the timing is wrong and
Congress sort of lays this thing out and they sure don't recommend
public involvement in any of the bills that I've seen.
MR. CAMERON: Let's explore Judy's cold water in terms of do
you need a common objective here to make this work.
While you're thinking about that, let's go to Fred. Fred, I
don't know if you want to offer something on this or something else, but
go ahead.
MR. DILGER: Actually, I've got five or six different
things, but I just want to make one point to build on the discussion
we've had. That is, I would refer everybody to a book called
"Understanding Risk" by the National Research Council. It contains a
lot of the things that Dr. Garrick just talked about and a lot of
different examples of successful processes that just are similar to the
ones we're talking about now.
The NRC, I believe, received a briefing on it at a meeting
in Karump some years ago by Paul Stern and it's becoming -- it's
controversial in the risk assessment community, as I understand it, but
it's also becoming fairly widely accepted.
A question I have for Abe and Bob, if they could. I don't
want to interrupt the thread of the conversation right now, but at some
point, I would like you to talk about -- you've laid out this process
and I'd like you to talk about how well you think you implemented the
process in the development of the draft EIS for Yucca Mountain and if
you feel you've been successful.
MR. CAMERON: I guess that's the second reference to the
EIS, and I don't want to necessarily disrupt the thread, because I think
we should explore this idea. But since it's probably a relatively
simple answer, I'll just ask Abe and Bob what they think about that.
MR. VAN LUIK: One of the things that we did not want to do
at this meeting is turn it into a discussion of the draft EIS. There are
a number of public meetings and there is a forum for putting your
comments in on the draft EIS.
My personal opinion is, I have read a few DOE EIS. I have
been involved in a few of them. I think this one reads very well and
it's a nicely done piece of work.
If you're against this project, you would not share that
opinion whatsoever, but this is one of the few that hangs together
actually and it makes sense from one discussion of the topic to another
discussion of the topic, with a couple of small exceptions.
If you have comments on the EIS, we urge you to come to
either the comment meetings or --
MR. DILGER: How would you relate it to the process that you
lined out?
MR. VAN LUIK: The process that I lined out is the specific
process for doing the safety assessment and explaining the safety
assessment, which has been partly imported into the EIS, which is really
published separately as the TSPA/VA, for example. That is specifically
what I was talking about. The draft EIS has a lot on its plate and a
minor amount of that is the total system performance assessment and its
results.
So the explanation of the TSPA and the EIS, if people want
to know what TSPA is all about, I would refer them to the TSPA/VA
instead. However, that said, I think that if you look carefully at the
TSPA description and the appendices in the draft environmental impact
statement, you get a pretty good idea how we did it and what was
involved, but the details are in the VA and its supporting documents.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Abe. Let's go over to Paul
Davis maybe on the thread that we were following.
MR. DAVIS: To respond to Abe. There was a process laid out
called system prioritization, which was designed to do that exactly.
That is, get the public involved at the ground level to build the PA, in
essence, from scratch, but not from scratch in terms of knowledge, but
in terms of agreement on where we were at.
So that process exists and we can talk about that process.
But when you said that, what came up, in my mind, was an integral part
of that process was actually WIPP, like Yucca Mountain, a very large
team of scientists and experts working on the problem and one of the
first steps was actually to normalize them and say did they all buy into
what was in performance assessment and that's not to say that anything
behind the scenes was going on or imply that at all.
Just professional, honest differences of opinion about what
the data said. So one of the more interesting things was a process
outlined to come to a consensus of what the team actually would believe
and present to the public as the first step.
So I'm very curious, in Yucca Mountain, how that process is
done when you come up with the viability assessment or the EIS, how do
you get the full breadth of experience and knowledge and differences of
opinion in the scientific team that works on Yucca Mountain.
MR. CAMERON: Go ahead, Abe.
MR. VAN LUIK: The process that we have in place, and Bob
knows the process inside out, because he suffers through it. I watch it
and enjoy it from a slight distance.
We actually have meetings that before every total system
performance assessment is planned that involves basically the parties
that are doing the work on the process level modeling. Every discipline
comes together with the other disciplines and says this is what we can
do, this is the basis for what we can do and this is how it will work
out, and then they go ahead and follow the mission that is outlined in
their statement and part of their mission is what their handouts and
feeds will be to performance assessment.
So it's basically every time, building from the ground up,
the basis, using that whole team. Now, when the final product is done,
sometimes there is a dissenting opinion among the scientists, saying not
disagreeing with the outcome of that total system performance
assessment, but saying the importance that you're assessment shows for
my area, I need to do some more work because I think we may not have
captured it correctly.
So those kinds of discussions go on and it is basically a
rather collegial, but a heated and passionate process of coming to that
final determination.
But when we're done, I think TSPA/VA, you can go to any
entity within our organizations, plural, and find that people generally
will buy into what it has and what it has in it, but they will always
caveat it by saying, yes, but in order to improve our understanding of
this area, we will have to do some more in this area, which is usually
the area that they're personally involved in, and that's the way it
should be.
Scientists should be always generically pushing for more
knowledge and capability.
MR. DAVIS: There was great difficulty that I found in that
we were presenting answers that always complied and then we had
experimentalists that said but you haven't considered or but you haven't
done it exactly right or we need more research in this area, and that
quandary just was incredibly difficult.
The way you just stated it was the way PA would state it, in
general, which is we've captured your concern, and we've done the
analysis and everybody would stand behind the analysis, and we comply.
On the surface, that says we're done. That says unless we're making the
statement, unless we're making the statement that you have an
uncertainty that's not quantified, that hasn't been investigated and has
the potential to show that the site is not safe.
Can you clarify that, where that world sits?
MR. VAN LUIK: Yes, and I would love to have some help from
Bob on this, too. But I think the point is that there are parties that
would say we were done years ago, because the results for the 10,000
year case always looked compliant, except 91 and 93, when we purposely
almost twisted the system to see what would make it break.
I think the real point is, and this is a point that I was
trying to make in my little talk, is we have to have confidence
ourselves that this analysis, even though the bottom line is okay, that
this analysis actually has enough of a basis that we have confidence
ourselves in this work, and I think that's where a lot of the drive
comes from to now finish up certain lines of evidence gathering, for
example, in seepage, longevity of waste package materials, et cetera.
And that drive comes not because the bottom line says we
need to do it, but because our belief in the defensibility of that
bottom line is still lacking something. So I think it's -- if you get
fooled by believing the bottom line without any regard to its basis, I
think there is a problem there, too, but that was never the case at
WIPP. I know we watched the pain in the system as you went toward
licensing and at some point in time, which is coming up pretty soon, we
will also severely curtail some of the activities of scientists who
basically are more interested in furthering the science than they are of
having the project succeed.
I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. Those are the kinds
of people you want to have working for you, because those are the people
with integrity, independence and insight and they're not yes-men. I
don't think we have many yes-men on the project, or yes-women for that
matter.
MR. CAMERON: Bob, do you want to add anything to what Abe
said?
MR. ANDREWS: No. I think Abe covered it pretty well. It
does bring a very interesting point, and that is something related to
like scientific consensus. Is such a thing possible either within the
project, with all of the varied groups of people who are looking at
particular aspects, or external to the Yucca Mountain project, and they
looking at the science and having comments on it.
If I focus on the internal project, there are numbers of
differing opinions about conceptual model A, B, C, for some process
component and there are advocates, if you will, for each of those
conceptual models based on their individual experiences, which, in fact,
might be -- I think Paul had a good example -- in fact, might be really
to scale, to the scale that they're used to thinking in or the
timeframes they're used to thinking in.
And somebody thinks outside of that scale or outside of that
timeframe and they come up with an alternative representation that
adequately explains the observations.
Where we strive for consensus is that the uncertainties
within each of those models have been adequately addressed and perhaps
all three of those models, or four, however many it is, are incorporated
and the impacts of that uncertainty, the significance of that
uncertainty, if you will, addressed within the context of either some
subsystem measure of performance or, if appropriate, the overall system
performance.
So to say that there is consensus at the lowest level that
this is the most prefect model and it explains everything and there's no
other alternatives that explain reasonably the observations, that
doesn't happen very much. But the reasonable range of alternatives,
that does occur.
MR. CAMERON: Go ahead, Abe, and then we'll go to Steve.
MR. VAN LUIK: They just handed me this piece of paper which
describes the meeting in the Federal Register, the meeting we're
attending today, and tomorrow's meeting has a presentation on DOE's work
reprioritization, which will explain that the reprioritization heavily
leaned on the results of the performance assessment, which is your
experience, also, but then we also had input from the experts, which Bob
was alluding to a moment ago, saying but you also need to consider this,
that and the other, because it may not be captured in the modeling.

So as long as that dialogue internally is alive and well, we
will move forward, and I have confidence that this is the right way to
go.
MR. CAMERON: So you will probably revisit this process
again tomorrow.
MR. VAN LUIK: We will revisit it also when we're done with
the site recommendation. We will get copious inputs from all parties on
the site recommendation and that will feed into repeating this whole
process again for the license application, unless, of course, Congress
says let's not do this, as Judy predicts.
MR. CAMERON: Steve.
MR. FRISHMAN: Let's go back to the cold water of Prince
William Sound for a minute. It has to do with what has been going here.
John, I think probably what you saw as a successful process in
developing a risk assessment for that particular area and maybe for the
larger issue of petroleum shipping in that area and so on was that
probably the real value of that advisory group was in doing just what's
being discussed here, but at a different level, and that's asking the
question to the people who have the most hands-on or direct experience,
did we think of everything.
I think that that's probably why you felt some measure of success there.
They were able to tell you things about that that you may not have
otherwise known or may not have been the subject of any scientific
inquiry, but they knew things about it.
It's like the development of the San Francisco Bay model,
which is an extremely comprehensive model and is tested essentially
every day. There are people who can tell you things that need to be
considered in models like that that you otherwise wouldn't know.
So now what I'm seeing here is an internal process where
you're asking yourselves did we think of everything, and if you
remember, this morning, relating to the -- referring to the focus
groups, that seemed, in your mind anyway, to be sort of the big trip
point where you said that you had this one person that you were sort of
impressed with, where they said if I'm convinced you've thought of
everything, and that's a pretty tough test.
Now, back to the cold water part, and that is that this
program has been consistent in not accepting even the ungeneral public's
offers to get at the questions of have we thought of everything, and
I'll just give two examples that I think are both really notable in the
program and suggest to me, also, that we're beyond the point of being
able to get a constructive system.
The first example was in 1983, just shortly after the
Nuclear Waste Policy Act passed, a group of state geologists went to the
program leadership and offered to serve as essentially an advisory
committee for purposes of looking primarily at criteria that should be
involved in site screening and further down the road in what things you
have to get at in site characterization.
They were summarily refused and the answer was just we don't
need your help. I know about that only because I worked for one of
those state geologists at the time.
The other example came about ten years later and that was
when there was a short-lived interest in whether people outside of the
Yucca Mountain project had any alternative conceptual models that were
of merit. There was a meeting on it and we and others presented an
alternative conceptual model for the unsaturated zone that today is
essentially the model that's being used, but there were a lot of years
and a lot of dollars in between when our presentation was, in essence,
ignored.
MR. FRISHMAN:The program has not been willing to do what you saw of
merit in the Prince William Sound system, or at least what I'm
interpreting to be that. The question of, have we thought of everything
needs to go beyond the walls of the work house. And in taking this
little bit of time to go through all this, actually it's a real benefit
because now I don't have to later on my time. I think that's a question
that maybe people can pursue a little bit more, but I think that's
really the essence of it.
MR. CAMERON: Well, let's explore that. Steve's making the
water a little bit warmer here in terms of is there a value of following
some model like that which was used in the Exxon Valdez for either the
performance, or it could be broader than that. Steve characterized it
as, have we thought of everything?
I think it would be useful to get some other opinions around
the table in terms of pros and cons, potential constraints,
opportunities, perspectives. Mal, do you have anything you'd like to
say on that?
MR. MURPHY: I think Steve and Dr. Gerrick have good points.
I don't know that you could accomplish as much as you did at Prince
William Sound with that kind of public involvement, but it certainly
would be useful, it seems to me.
As Steve was talking I was sitting here -- I'm sorry I can't
bring back into my memory the exact details. May Nick Stelevato could
help out. But I recall, in discussing something -- whether it was the
proposed NRC regulations or earlier versions of the EPA standards or a
model. But at some point in time, I recall specifically at a meeting in
Amarbossa Valley when one of the Federal agencies, DOE, NRC, EPA or
someone else, was making decisions or, or posing, you know, had a model
that was based on certain assumptions with respect to the level of the
ground water some place. I don't remember exactly where.
It went, two or three members of the public stood up and
said, now wait a minute. My well is 500 feet away from there and it
only goes 300 feet deep. You know, something to that effect. There's
an example of where the public input, almost unsolicited public input,
probably changed some of the scientific parameters that the program
dealt with.
Another area that I could think of was, was the, you know,
the description and definition of the Amarbossa Valley biosphere.
Nobody has ever convened a meeting of the people who lived in Amarbossa
Valley to talk about how they live. And that, it certainly couldn't
hurt. It may not be the be-all and end-all of performance assessment,
but it sure wouldn't hurt to do it.
MR. CAMERON: Let me go to Paul Davis. Paul, you, you
talked about process. What do you think about this idea? Have you had
any experience with this type of steering committee approach? Do you
have any thoughts on this?
MR. DAVIS: The process that I referred to earlier was less
of a steering committee than it was a really open invitation to anybody
to participate in building the performance assessment from the ground up
and having their input at every step of the way. I think it is a
valuable approach. I think it builds trust.
Let me say a couple of the attributes of it that I found
interesting. One was an unexpected consequence, which is if you really
put the scientists doing the work in front of the public, then the trust
level went way up. And that is, when they were hiding behind their
desks and in Sandia Labs and publishing reports and journal articles,
that was a pretty mystical experience to the public as to what went on
in that process and who did it.
When you saw that these were honest people trying to do an
honest job, very concerned about the issues, the trust level in the
people went dramatically up. That was certainly the good side of the
process. Even separate from what they said -- we believe in that
person; they obviously are trying to do the best thing that they can.
But now the downside, which really I should have recognized
when I started the process and defined the process but didn't -- too
naive -- was that any process that you employ like that, if it is
serious in getting the public involvement, it means fundamentally you
give up power. I don't know anybody at this table that wants to do
that. And it turns out at WIPP, people didn't want to give up power up
either, who did -- let's say, the middle ground gave up power. The
middle ground on both sides of DOE, Sandia, for example, were willing to
give up power in the belief that the right answer would just come out.
And the middle ground of the environmental community are the
stakeholders who are willing to play in this game and give up power.
Giving up power from their end meant that if at the end of the day the
answer complied and we had resolved their concerns, it really complied
and they were done with their comments and concerns about their
repository.
Now the extremes didn't want to do that. The extreme of the
environmental group essentially opted out after the first meeting,
realizing that, you know, if they bought into the process and the answer
was not what they wanted, which was that WIPP shouldn't, they didn't
want to be part of the process. They didn't want to lend credibility to
the process by being in it.
The extremes at the other side of DOE quite honestly didn't
like that. They didn't want the process being driven by the public
because in their mind, they already knew WIPP was safe. It was a done
deal. Now it was a process of demonstrating safety; not assessing
safety. So they bought out of it.
And those were the great difficulties of any meaningful
process.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you. That's very insightful on
this, and John, do you have something to say on this?
DR. GARRICK: I just wanted a little clarification on the
Prince William Sound risk assessment, and Judy really beat me to the
punch on wanting to be heard.
The first thing I want to say is that this risk assessment
was not analyzing the Exxon Valdez accident so much as it was to
quantify the future risk of the Prince William Sound operations. That's
just a point of clarification.
The other thing I wanted to say is that the process was not
perfect and it wasn't without its critics. They worked very hard to
have what would appear to be a total public representation and input
into the process. But there were some people that accused the steering
committee of being bought out, so to speak, by the operators, etc. etc.,
which we did not think was the case.
Third thing, my involvement in that was as a member of a
national academy committee that was reviewing it, reviewing the Prince
William Sound risk assessment and some of the operations up there. I
was not a member of the team that actually carried out the risk
assessment.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you, John. And before we go to Judy, I
think you've followed some of the points that Paul made about, it's not
going to be perfect in the sense it's going to please everyone. There
has to be the correct focus for what this Committee looks at. Steve has
characterized it as, have we thought of everything?
It seems like there's some feeling around the table that
there might be some usefulness. But am I being too simplistic in terms
of wondering why, if this is a good idea and we've come all this way --
all this way is maybe relative -- buy why hasn't it been done before?
Is it the fear of giving up power, as Paul Davis mentioned? Judy?
MS. TREICHEL: No, it came dreadfully close to having been
done before because at one point, Hazel O'Leary ordered that it be done
and the entire AUG, the affected units of government, stood up in unison
and refused, and put -- I think Russ Dyer at that time at that time was
the acting director -- and put him in a real bind because he couldn't
deliver and the edict had come down. But there's a huge difference in
coming up with a citizen advisory board and -- I don't want to use that
word "stakeholder" because everybody who's used it around the table here
has meant something else -- allowing the public in, as you described it,
where you just open the door and let them come in and take suggestions
from whoever. When you put together an advisory board, you're adding
another layer of bureaucracy and something else that's just a real
hurdle for real people out there. So I think that's a mistake.
But it does come down to the power thing. And in many of
the foreign programs, you see, you hear about things like raw data being
available to people who are not part of the program. All sorts of
openness that really does take away the power and leaves the thing as
vulnerable as it's supposed to be, if it's not already been deemed a
repository.
MR. CAMERON: Often these citizens' advisory board meetings
are open to the public so that -- you can try to, I guess, use the value
of having this focused organizational look and still have the public in,
like Paul was talking about. But maybe it is just another layer of
bureaucracy. Abby?
MS. JOHNSON: Well, I have several thoughts. One is that t
o a certain extent, each of these regulatory agencies is a closed
system. And I heard Abe say, gosh, thank goodness we can interact with
the NRC, and they'll understand what we're talking about when we talk
about risk -- implying that the rest of us, it's much harder to talk to
and get your message across.
I've heard, not today but in general, that the NRC is going
to accept, will accept the environmental impact statement to the extent
practicable, and that their interpretation of that is basically, we'll
take what they give us.
In terms of the stakeholder advisory board kind of stuff,
Judy's absolutely right. Ms. O'Leary ordered the creation of a site-
specific advisory board for Yucca Mountain and it did not happen. It
was an unworkable kind of a thing.
My concern is that when we start to get in this area, we
just have some kind of forum where people can listen. Well, I have yet
to see where, when people have ideas, they get incorporated into the
system and anything changes. You know, a first step of faith building
would be to say, gee, I think we'll wait until the thermal tests are
done before we build the repository -- but no, we're schedule-driven so
we're going to do the thermal test at the same time we build the
repository. Just as a small example. I don't see that there's any
openness in terms of having the system wait, the process wait, until
more information comes in.
On the other hand, if you listen to Paul Davis enough, you
realize that it doesn't really matter anyway because in the end it is
uncertain.
[Laughter.]
MR. CAMERON: And maybe we'll, when we hear the presentation
on WIPP, maybe there's some lessons there.
We really have managed to maintain our 45-minute delay. So
I would like to -- I think it would be good to hear from Abe and Steve
quickly, and maybe do the transportation panel and go to the public
quickly, after that, although there may be some different ideas out
there. Go ahead, Abe.
MR. VAN LUIK: Yeah, I think this illustrates one of the
difficulties in explaining our perception of risk versus the typical
public perception of risk, including my wife's and my mother's. Say,
well, if you're doing these tests, why don't you wait until they're in,
until you make decisions. And the point is, you make decisions in the
face of uncertainty regardless of these tests.
The NWTRB has already pointed out to us that we need to
repeat some tests in different rock units to have more confidence in the
kinds of things that we're talking about. The point is that the risk
that we are facing in obtaining a license to build a repository is a
huge fiscal risk. The radiological risk for which we're doing these
calculations, from which to protect ourselves, don't come in for at
least 5, probably 10 years after that. So the licensing process as it
is written in 60 and 63 allows for decisions to go forward at certain
points, and for the basis for those decisions, the basis for the
confidence statement in your repository safety statement has to rise
with each level. And as soon as you begin to take on radiological risk,
that's when really, you know, some of these things need to be nailed
down pretty well.
But I think that's a hard thing to convey. I'm just telling
you it's a difficult thing to convey -- that we think we know enough to
go forward to this step, but we will know more, quite a bit more,
especially when we start excavating a lot of tunnels, before we take the
next step in assuming risk, which is to actually receive waste.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. there still seems to be this item of
faith that things might, some things might change that seems to need to
be demonstrated somehow. Steve, you want to give us a final comment on
this, and we'll quickly go out here to the audience.
MR. FRISHMAN: Just a very quick observation, and that's
that, Paul, I think your analysis of the power system is entirely
correct. And it shows in the DOE's repository program to the extent
that they've never been able to pull together a public involvement plan.
They've got a plan for everything else but they've never been able to
make that one work. And it -- in my experience, because I think I've
been involved in it, let's see? Well, I've been involved in it since
passage of the original act. What happens, each time there's any
discussion of it, is the DOE managers very quickly leap to the point, we
cannot give away our statutory authority. And that's the end of the
conversation. And that's, you know, that's the power system one level
above where you experience it.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. We're going to go on to the
audience very quickly for a couple of comments, and we're going to do
our transportation panel.
MS. MANNING: All of you need to read the book "Risk
Assessment", by Howard Margolis, because he wrote the book on how to get
public participation into nuclear waste, site-specifically, at other
high-risk sites. And it's very important because he, he suggests
getting a paid consultant for the public. In other words, the
perpetrator of the risk pays for an expert to represent the public, and
the public gets to choose. The non-technical stakeholder gets to choose
the expert. That's another way you could go about solving this problem.
My question to Abe Van Luik is, why didn't you twist Yucca
Mountain to the breaking point? That's a very important piece of public
information.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you, Mary. Sally, very quickly
please.
MS. DEVLIN: I'm just wondering -- show of hands -- if
anybody here knows Lisa Crawford from Fenauld? All right. Anybody that
knows Lisa knows that the Government poisoned the town of Fenauld,
12,000 people, denied it. They were sued in court for $300 million and
they settled for $42 million. This made the town bond.
They had the strongest group of any place I know of in the
nation. They count the cancer deaths. They count this. They count
that. They were intelligent enough to say, we do not want to dump
everything on the test site, and they went and got a company from Texas
that transmuted the dirty soil, or whatever you call it, so that 90
percent will reusable; only 10 percent will come to NTS.
Now this is not what we have in Perump or Bahey or
Amarbossa. We don't have intelligent leases. There're not a lot of
silos across the country, but there are a few of them. And we get utter
disrespect. The leases get respect because they learned how to go to
court. Remember -- WIPP took 15 years to get there. How many years
it's going to take Yucca Mountain with litigation? I said 20; it's
probably going to be 25. Things change in 25 years, and a lot is
learned. And I haven't heard you say anything alternative regarding
transmutation or any of these things for Yucca Mountain, because it's
there if you want to find it.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you, Sally. Grant, please make
it quick.
MR. HORNBERGER: The, what we're talking about is results
management that Congress put in. And Leah Deaver tried to learn how to
do that, and as a result, those of you that are dragging your feet and
don't want to learn how to do it, she now has four Yucca Mountains under
her command.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Grant. And for those of you
who want to explore that or don't know who Grant is talking about,
please talk to him at the break.
Let's do our panel on transportation now. I think we're
bringing Jim -- right? Jim Miller?
MR. WILLIAMS: Jim Williams.
MR. CAMERON: Jim Williams, okay -- up to the table from Nye
County. Excuse me -- Fred is up here from Clark. Abby's with us from
Eureka. And Mike Boffman from Lincoln. Is there anybody else? Okay.
Anybody, who would like to lead off? Jim, we haven't heard anything
from you today. Why don't you go ahead.
MR. WILLIAMS: I very carefully arranged that.
[Laughter.]
MR. WILLIAMS: Well I can start briefly. The topic here is
analyzing the risk of transporting high-level nuclear waste. And I'm to
provide a few of the perspectives of Nye County. The topic might be
transformed a bit and say, well, is the probabilistic risk assessment
included in the EIS, sufficient as a basis for policy decision? And the
EIS says explicitly that is. And Nye County says that it is a
sufficient basis for all key decisions of mode, route, equipment and
operations. And Nye County says that the technical analysis is not
irrelevant, but neither is it sufficient. And to proceed as if it is
sufficient is a bad and costly policy, potentially costly policy.
Nye County's perspective is based on, is sort of colored, I
think, by things that tend to be outside the discussion, like the
history of NTS; and the history of NTS within the DOT complex; and Nye
County's own aspirations for its future in the aftermath of the cold
war. So let me give you a few examples of that, if I could.
One is that Nye County very much sees itself as the target
for not one, but two major national shipment campaigns, one of which
involves low-level waste shipments in numbers up to about 30,000 from 25
or more sites around the country, of 4-1/2 million curies, up to 4-1/2
million curies, which compares to about 2.7 million slated for WIPP over
about 20 years. Then you add to that the prospective high-level, which
comes from 72 to 75 sites, 50- to 75,000 shipments; 14 billion curies
over 24 years. Fourteen billion compares to about 500 million released
in all of the weapons, NTS. So Nye County's sort of saying, well, hmm,
disposal is this massive transfer of radiological burden around the
country to one rural community in Nevada.
Second, Nye County sees this, the prospective campaigns, as
additional to the past radiological impositions. The NTS weapons
testing is key among them. It was about 500 million curies over 40
years. It was a commercial site for low-level waste disposal that
operated for 31 years. It was very controversial. And then there was,
has been NTS disposal of low-level waste, which is involved in 22,000
shipments and 3.6 million curies over the last few years.
So Nye County's observations are that the Congress and DOE,
in their behavior, view this site as just a dump, which Nye County
doesn't want to be. And the DOE clean-up effort at NTS is a small
portion of what it is in other DOE sites -- as low as six percent; as
high as twenty percent. But never equal.
And the community development effort that has gone on in Nye
County as related to NTS has never been in any way comparable to what
has occurred in DOE's flagship communities -- Oakridge, Richland, and so
on. That's point two.
Point three is that the use of NTS in Nye County has had
major benefit for others. A recent study indicates that low-level waste
disposal at NTS, prospectively, will save the Federal Treasury somewhere
between $2- and $7 billion in avoided costs compared to other
alternatives. And you can just look at the no-action and proposed-
action alternatives in the EIS and observe that the Yucca Mountain is
worth about $28 billion in the difference between them. Those savings
accrue to the Federal Treasury to nuclear utilities.
So the theme is that there's an exploitation here and that
there's been a consistent under-representation of the value of the, of
this site to the Nation. It's extremely valuable but treated like it's a
dump.
Regarding transportation, Nye County feels that it's the
rural destination county affected by politically powerful communities,
and that the mode routing decisions are blatantly political, and that
the decision criteria are inappropriate to a very large-scale campaign -
- two of them, prospectively -- long-term and focused on a single
location.
There's been another interesting study on low-level waste
that can be used to compare two alternatives for intermodal shipment of
low-level waste to NTS. The alternative that meets California's
preference not to have waste intermodally transferred at Barstow, and
Lincoln County's preference to have it intermodally transferred at
Caliente -- what does it do? It increases radiological risk by 14
percent nationwide; accident risk by 10 percent; total risk by over 10
percent; system costs by about 8 percent; and in the process, increases
the same risk in Nevada by 45 times, 5 times, 10 times.
Another, same study has two alternatives for legal waste
shipment to NTS. The one that meets Clark County's understandable
preference that it not go through Clark County -- what does it do?
System-wide, it increases radiological risk by 9 percent; accident risk
by 13 percent; total risk by 12 percent; total cost by 10 percent; and
the increases in Nye County are dramatic, dramatic.
Now the decisions -- this is almost my last point. The
decisions in this on the low-level waste are being made by 25 or more
DOE generator sites and their carriers. The understanding is that they
make these decisions on their own, consistent with DOT and NRC
regulations. On spent fuel, the decisions will be made in the future by
4 regional service contractors who will make their decisions, consistent
with DOT and NRC regulations. So the decisions here are being made by
others and from prospective origin sites, without considering the scale
or the long-term or the single focus of this prospective campaign. And
with no notion between integration between DOT stovepipes for low-level
and high-level waste.
So my few thoughts are that there needs to be equity in this
process, and at minimum, there should be a destination state and county
formal role on a more acceptable process. There should be a kind of
commitment. The DOE needs to put their proposal as to how this should
be done right on the line and negotiate it.
There is precedent. There has been the successful
campaigns. I'm thinking of WIPP and Mabel Fuel have gone well beyond
the DOT and NRC regulations that are guiding these two campaigns. And
the integration -- a plan that has an integrated notion between two
major campaigns that focus on NTS and Nye County needs to happen, and it
probably cannot happen without some external push. It's likely, in my
view, that DOE is not set up to resolve those two stovepipes on its own.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Jim. Let's hear from the rest
of the panel, and then we'll open it up to the group. But I think one
point I heard there is there's no centralized, integrated, systematic
decision making on how this happens. All right. And we'll see how
others think about this.
Let's go up to Lincoln County, to Mike Brougtman.
MR. BROUGTMAN: Thanks. I actually have a handout but I
don't have enough copies for everybody. So if you could work these
around the table and share and be sure the Advisory Committee members
get those.
If I could Chip, I'd like to run over this overhead
projector.
MR. CAMERON: Yeah, do you want to use it?
MR. BROUGTMAN: This is the Price is Right segment of the
show.
[Laughter.]
MR. BROUGTMAN: And I apologize to the folks in the audience
that I don't have more copies of these hand-outs, but we can get them to
you if you'd like.
I guess the first question I would pose with regard to
trans-station risk is will transportation risk influence spent fuel
disposal policy? The numbers that I'm gonna put up here are all out of
the draft environmental impact statement. What this table shows you is
a summation of the risks, or basically the fatalities, total fatalities
from the different alternatives, from different sources, both
radiological and non-radiological. And then you see some conclusions on
the bottom half of this.
And if you review all of this, I think what it clearly
suggests is if we want to reduce public hazard, reduce the loss of life,
certainly we ought to consider on-site storage for the first hundred
years and see if there isn't a better solution, because most fatalities
will occur during the first hundred years. And over ninety percent of
the fatalities associated with this program will be associated with
transportation, and that's a point I made earlier today.
And so, I just wonder if transportation will influence waste
disposal policy and I would suggest that to date, transportation has
seemingly had very little influence on disposal policy and we are
focused very heavily on the risks associated with repository, when they
seemingly pose the least amount of our concerns, certainly in the
shortrun.
Now when you go to the very longrun, on-site disposal under
the assumptions in the EIS clearly is not the preferred option. And
going to centralized repositories seems to make a lot of sense. And I
believe those assumptions are subject to some challenge.
But I would also suggest that this kind of underscored Jim
Williams' point about equity. This is another table. This table is
right out of the draft environmental impact statement. The previous one
was data that we compiled from the EIS. This is an analysis of all the
different routes for legal weight trucks. And the point I would make
here is that the, the base case which is coming in on I15 under highway
road control quantities regs., if you go over to Wynn Dover v. U.S. 95,
that's an alternative that comes in at the state line of northern
Nevada, comes down through White County into Nye. That's the route that
the state has identified as a candidate for the Governor to designate,
if the Governor elects to keep the waste out of Las Vegas Valley.
Given that the Governor has elected to acquiesce to
shipments of low-level waste along this very same route, rather than
have that waste come through Las Vegas Valley, it seems plausible to us
that the Governor may in fact designate this as an alternate route.
Well, if you look at the numbers of this alternate route,
the risks are greater. We will not minimize risk by coming down from
the North. What we may minimize the potential stigma impacts to the Las
Vegas area and the resulting economic and fiscal consequences. Those
kinds of things are not addressed at all in the EIS.
So it does raise some questions about how have we treated
transportation risk, certainly within the context of this document, but
also perhaps how we're treating it with regard to the decisions we're
making about how to manage waste, how to, you know, bring it to Nevada,
and things of that nature. And again, I would suggest that all of these
points are very important with regard to equity.
Let me -- I'm not going to belabor all the points in this
hand-out. So the two first obvious questions are, what role does
transportation risk play then with both disposal policy and also routing
decisions. You've had some discussions earlier today on factors, on
different issues in terms of communication of risk.
I'm not going to go through the factors affecting the
application of risk, but Mary Manning and I go way back, and it's not
always been a cordial kind of relationship. But the availability
heuristic in terms of how the media reports the risks, how the state
interprets risks, how all responsible parties interpret and report risk,
does have a very significant impact on perceived risk and how people
view risks. And I think the availability heuristic is one we ought to
pay a lot of attention to.
I would also suggest that emergency mismanagement is an
issue that has not been addressed really in the EIS, has not been
considered as perhaps a component to risk, and the assumption is that we
will be effectively able to respond to incidents or accidents involving
the transportation or even things happening on-site. And if we're
wrong, that mismanagement can in fact serve to amplify the risk. And I
certainly think that we have not probably gone far enough to look at
that.
With regard to how we estimate transportation risk, I would
note that the use of rad-tran, and in particular the derivation of
population densities along the transportation corridors, uses an
algorithm which basically takes the population within the census areas
and comes up with an average population density for that census. Those
of you who are familiar with rural Nevada will know that most population
is concentrated immediately adjacent to the transportation
infrastructure. So within that 800-meter corridor, you have a much
higher population density perhaps than what a normal kind of rad-tran
distribution would provide.
And just in terms of how stakeholder influence influences
the process, we in Lincoln County hired the University of Nevada-Las
Vegas, did our own rad-tran risk assessments, using rad-tran; provided
that information to DOE; alerted them to this problem with estimating
populations along these corridors. And as far as I can tell, our advice
was not heeded. I think that's problematic.
You'll note at the bottom of this second page, where it says
"factors affecting the acceptance of risk." You had quite a
conversation about that this morning. Again, I would just encourage you
to consider benefit-cost analysis with regard to transportation in all
sources of risk. I for one think that we are spending way too much time
in the wrong areas if we're truly concerned about public health and
safety.
And then finally, the risk of transportation-induced
stigmatization. I know this is a scenario the State has spent a lot of
time looking at. I know the agencies have had difficulty with this one.
It does posit some rather significant impacts, economic and perhaps
fiscal impacts. But I do think that there is merit in trying to
understand the likelihood that an area could be stigmatized, and what
the consequences of that stigma would be, and perhaps have in place a
contingency plan that deals with that.
Again, Lincoln County took a look at the accident at Three-
Mile Island. We looked at the impacts to tourism in the region
immediately following the accident. It's one of the only studies I'm
aware of that was done really in that regard. We then took a look at,
in our area, were the public to respond in the same way to the perceived
threat of exposure radioisotopes from an accident, that we would lose
during peak seasons perhaps $500 to a $1 million a year. And this is a
very small county, so those are big numbers to us. But we would lose
that much in economic activity.
Our point would be that we ought to have in place a
contingency plan that says, if we ever had an accident on the UP main
line, approximate to one of the five state parks in our area, that there
would be no questions asked. The contingency plan that would deal with,
for example, tours and promotion would kick in immediately. It's a very
small cost to put that together to fund it, to have it just sitting
there with the money in the bank ready to go, such that if ever it
happens, we've addressed it. Our concern is the EIS is silent on these
matters, and these are elements of transportation risk which I think are
very important. We have made the responsible parties aware that they
are important to us, and I think the fact that they are not address gets
back to this issue of trust.
And I will just close by noting that for the ACNW, I'll
circle all the way back around to my earlier comment that I would
encourage you to, one, challenge the staff to not simply adopt the final
EIS on its face because it's very likely that it will not address many
of the issues that you will see the stakeholders coming to the
Commission around as prospective conditions to a licensing. And a
contingency plan for an economic impact is one of those, perhaps.
Thanks.
Should I give this to Fred?
MR. CAMERON: Why don't we go to Abby next, and we'll finish
up with Fred. I'm putting your last point on the Advisory Committee
challenging the Staff to take a real hard look at that EIS in terms of
transportation up here under the Advisory Committee potential
recommendations to consider.
Abby, do you want to --
MS. JOHNSON: Sure.
MR. CAMERON: -- go ahead.
MS. JOHNSON: I only have six copies of this, so those of
you who know what Crescent Valley, Nevada looks like keep going around,
and those of you that are from somewhere else take a look and share.
My name's Abby Johnson. I'm the nuclear waste advisor to
Eureka County, Nevada. Eureka County is in north central Nevada,
bounded by Interstate 80 -- not bounded, but Interstate 80 runs through
it, as well as the Union Pacific railroad tracks. And our primary
concern, direct concern is that one of five proposed rail alternatives
to take waste to Yucca Mountain would be a rail line built through our
county starting from the UP and proceeding southwest through Crescent
Valley, which is a valley, and also the town site of Crescent Valley,
which is that little kind of cross-hatched box that you can see near the
route.
So, I'm not going to talk in social scientists' terms or
anything. I'm just going to tell you what it's like for the people in
Crescent Valley and the kinds of questions that I get and what, what,
how we're trying to kind of deal with the risk questions that come from
people who live in Crescent Valley related to this project.
This is in the context of a very small town that's at the
mouth of the nationwide transportation funnel, potentially. The
existing rail is 20 miles away. People live in Crescent Valley because
they want to get away from the Federal government, primarily. One of
the hardest things in my job is that there's a small group of concerned
citizens who are really wanting information and wanting to know what
they can do to get more educated. Most of them don't have telephones,
let alone the internet, let alone, in some cases, power. And so it's
quite a challenge to bring this information to them. And I can't just
pick up the phone and say to them, hey, I just got this thought. It
doesn't happen that way.
As with many people who live in small towns, and as in the
overall discussion of risks, there's risks that they choose to assume by
living in Crescent Valley. You know, people that don't have phones,
they don't have any ready access to the limited emergency response
capability that is there should they have a heart attack or whatever.
Those are the risks they're assuming. The risk of living in a valley
with nuclear waste transportation is -- a ranch with a hot springs. And
it has the vision of developing a bed and breakfast, hot springs,
mineral bath, retreat, you get the drift, and is absolutely horrified to
learn that she might have, instead of just hot springs in the back yard,
a rail line in the front yard. And what that does to her retirement,
her dream of this, and her way of life and her business plan -- that
leads to a whole series of questions that are just beginning to be asked
about property values, perceived risk, actual risk, all those kinds of
things. These are questions that people just ask and I say, well I can
answer it or I'll get back to you. Those are my two favorite response.
The challenge is to communicate the risk, both real and
perceived. And as I heard earlier a couple of times, to acknowledge the
-- Robert said cultural heritage and someone else kind of turned that
into a different meaning. But the impacts on the community lifestyle,
all that kind of thing, the property values.
I've been involved with this program on and off since the
passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, like Steve. And from the very
start it was my observation that transportation has always taken a back
seat. The guidelines say that finding a safe place for 10,000 years is
more important than getting the waste there.
What we're seeing in the EIS is that same thing. There's
just a barebones minimal amount of information on what they call the
Carlin rail route, which is the one we're concerned with. And DOE has
made it very clear that they will make a decision on transportation
based on that amount of information. I challenge each of you to read
the portions of the EIS that, for the sake of this discussion, talk
about the Carlin route and then think about building a rail line through
your community based on that amount of information and whether you would
accept it and whether you would be comfortable with the Federal
Government making a decision about building a rail line to transport
anything, including nuclear waste based on the lack of information
that's in that document.
We have developed a GIS system which has come in very handy
recently. And through our analysis of overlaying this rail route with
our parcel maps, we have found that 59 percent of the assessed parcels
in Eureka County are within 10 miles of this proposed rail line, so we
are quite effective, as are a lot of out-of-towners who own property.
What's missing, as Mike said, in the EIS, and what we are
concerned about, whether or not there's an EIS, is the emergency
response, the emergency medical -- it's just not there. I liked Mike's
term "emergency mismanagement" because that's a real possibility, too.
Sometimes we as the county's kind of -- there's a seesaw and
we go like this and the other one goes like this, and that's a very
possible thing to do when you have as urban a state as we have and as
many rural counties as we have all being together at the same time. One
of the things that we have identified that Clark doesn't appreciate that
much is that if something happened in one of our communities, it would
affect 100 percent of the residents of our community -- 100 percent.
Whereas it would be a very small percentage likely, of the vast urban
populous. This isn't a right or wrong; it's just an interesting
observation, and sometimes we see that rural is the solution because
there's fewer people. And we're concerned that that's a risk trade-off
that we're not all involved with. Is it all okay to dump it on rural
America?
Finally, I think the hidden strategy in the EIS is to put
enough information to build a repository, postpone the decisions on
transportation, even though you're going to make them on the information
that's in the EIS, so that by the time you make the decisions, you tell
the public, well I'm sorry, we're already building your repository; it's
too late to do anything about the transportation. That's a long way off
from Crescent Valley, but those are some of the issues that we deal with
as we're considering the risks of transportation.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks Abby. So far, there seems to be
a theme of lack of information and analysis on transportation issues.
But perhaps just as importantly, the lack of focus -- that might be the
wrong way to say it. But, has transportation really be adequately
factored in to the whole waste management decision making process. And
let's go to Fred to see how all that holds up.
MR. DILGER: I'm in an awkward position this afternoon. not
only have my colleagues stolen my thunder for tomorrow, to add insult to
injury, I've got to steal my own thunder for tomorrow, so I'll be in
Abe's boat, redoing the presentation tonight.
I just want to reiterate a couple of things and highlight a
couple of things that have already been said pretty much, that we think
are important. The first is Jim's point about an integrated approach.
We've been involved with the Department of Energy in one particular
site, the site that shipped leaking boxes of radioactive materials to
the test site for about six years, trying to get some agreement with
them. We've only been partially successful, and our success has not
been applied complex-wide.
On the low-level side, there's fragmentation and what we see
as very, a lot of confusion. Added on to that, the high-level waste
program just worsens the situation from our perspective, and we think
that the Department of Energy needs to take a look at the management of
transportation.
Another issue that's been raised here today is stakeholder
involvement. I think one of the things that has impeded stakeholder
involvement and the transportation program in particular has been the
sheer scale of the problem that we're talking about, that there's a
reluctance on the part of the Department of Energy to address it on a
national level, by trying to get some -- you know, there'd be no limit
to the stakeholders that you could involve in a project like this. But
it does seem to us like something that has to be done.
Transportation has, for the most part, been largely ignored
over the last few years. We call it the "field of dreams" approach; you
know, if we build it, then it will come. And just to highlight Abby's
point, the thinking seems to be that if the Department of Energy spends
all of its money constructing the site, they can turn to the Congress
and say, well we've done our job; now it's your turn to make the
transportation part of it work or give us the funds to make it work.
I want to talk to something, I want -- I suppose you'll hear
about it later on, but I do want to say, you know, on a positive note,
that WIPP probably provides the best model for how to do a
transportation program successfully. In fact, in my experience it's
been the only one that has been successful on a national basis. Part of
the success of that have been that they have undertaken extra regulatory
measures to ensure, get agreement with the stakeholders. And this is
something the Department of Energy should not be afraid to do.
One think I think that the ACNW can, an issue the ACNW can
treat is, I think we have an agency missing here today. We have the
EPA. You're going to be talking to the NRC, but I think the Department
of Transportation should be involved in meetings like this because,
although the NRC has a key role or lead role in regulating the
Department of Energy, ultimately when it comes to transportation NRC
licenses casks, but there's a lot of other transportation issues out
there that are going to fall through the cracks if we don't get the
Department of Transportation involved.
On the last, the last point I want to make is about
transportation risk. From our perspective, we choose to focus a little
bit more on impacts. This is because when the county commissioners turn
to us and ask questions, it's always phrased in that way -- they want to
know how it's going to affect people, how it will affect the county and
that kind of thing. Abby made the point about most of her constituents
living near the area, the same thing that Mike mentioned.
In our case, we've analyzed the routes that are contained in
the draft EIS and done some simple modeling to estimate what the loss in
property values might be. If you take a very modest estimate, about 5
percent, which is what was awarded in the Comas v. Santa Fe case,
depending on the route you choose it varies between $17- and $54
million, just from a route designation. Now we don't know that that'll
come to pass, but we do know that that's a big impact.
When the county recorder was briefed on this, the first
thing out of her mouth was that Clark County would lose between $2- and
$3 million. The county government would lose between $2- to $3 million
the day some routes were designated. So we see this as an impact that
is certainly not addressed in the EIS, and it's certainly something
that's very, very real, and it's also something that Congress is
probably not going to be willing to fund. So with that, I'll be quiet
and turn it back over to Chip.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Fred. The "stealing the
thunder" remark that Fred mentioned, stealing his own thunder, referred
to -- for your information, there's going to be a presentation on
transportation again tomorrow, from 4:15 to 5:00. And although there
may be different, the counties may have different interests in some
respects, there seem to be some common threads that you all have
expressed on this, and I would open it up to the rest of the panel,
including those of you from the counties who might want to respond to
something that the other counties have said. Let's go to Robert Olden.
MR. HOLDEN: A doctor went looking for his patient and found
him and said, "I have good news and bad news, so what do you want to
hear?" He said, "Well give me the good news first." He said, "Well,
the good news is that you have 24 hours left." The patient said, "Well,
if that's good, what's the bad?" He said, "I tried to find you
yesterday."
[Laughter.]
MR. HOLDEN: In regards to models and transportation and
providing for impacts and support, and costs in the event of event of
transportation accidents, there's so much I'd like to say but I'll try
to sum it up in as few words as possible. But in regards to models, I
don't think WIPP is the exact model. And that's sort of like good news
and bad news -- they're beginning to work with the tribes, but they
should have done it 15 years ago. I worked with some tribes about that
time, 15 years ago, and the WIPP folks promised infrastructure,
development, equipment, training, and readiness. And that's not
happened for a lot of the pueblos and tribes who will be impacted, who
are impacted now and very soon.
I guess I'm also saying a lot that I've said in previous
meetings with DOE, with NRC, as well as FEMA. And that's some of what
Abby was saying, you know, that the places that's being looked at, the
rural areas, places with little or no populations, those are describing
tribal lands as well. And they certainly deserve no less protection
than anyone else in an urban area. The resources do not go to those
areas. You folks involved with management, emergency management made me
aware of that.
You may have seen the crack response team out of Oklahoma
City that responded to the bombing a few years ago. That was a model
and it worked very well. I'm from Oklahoma, and t hat's good to see.
But I know some folks who are in the urban areas who say, well, that's
well and good, but we don't have anything because all of the money flows
through the urban areas through Oklahoma to Tulsa and so forth. So
that's the downside.
As Abby stated a while ago, a lot of the program dollars
that were going out to states, and even to our organization, the NCAI,
for transportation-related matters, training, readiness and just general
information that's been cut off because the emphasis was on building the
repository, and that was the lifeline to a lot of tribes in terms of
just getting general information about what is coming soon into their
front yard, and not necessarily the back yard. And for many of these
areas, DOE has maintained that many of these areas do not have emergency
management infrastructures in place, and so they're having to gear up
from scratch in some instances. And DOE maintains that they, you know,
they're not there to be the builder of these program; however, were it
not for these, this radiological waste, they would not need these
programs, at least at the level they now have to be prepared for. But I
guess what also is happening at the same time is the formula that's
being looked at internally at DOE for providing resources to states and
tribes under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act for safe routine
transportation. And these formulas certainly leave out, or seem to act
against tribes because the dollars not only within FEMA but within DOE
and other agencies, all of those have been going to the states and none
to the tribes.
There was a study that was done -- I guess the idea was to
make us feel good, make tribes feel good, that there was funding to the
states and tribe that showed at least they were getting some money. But
when you look at the proportions, the hundreds of millions of dollars
that had gone to the states and the sums that had gone to the tribes,
it's, it wasn't a laughing matter.
I guess that's what I would like to see happen, is for
someone to tap DOE on the shoulder and remind them of what we've been
saying all along, that these programs take many, many years to put in
place -- training, development, turnover, all these nuances that go into
emergency management schemes. We need those in place -- we needed them
yesterday, of course, but we don't have them. But still, DOE sees them
on the horizon and we need to be ready for this.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Robert. Some special issues in
regards to the tribes there, but also some of the same types of common
threads that we heard from the counties. Bill?
MR. VASCONI: Yes, back to entitlement and benefits -- and I
do appreciate your comments, Jim and Mike. I think the entitlements
equities issues have always been out there somewhere, especially that
the local government would pursue.
I've got an old copy here of the Weapons Complex Monitor of
'96 -- Nevada Test Site is Nation's Largest Waste Disposal Site. It
also mentioned in here what money's being put out elsewhere, where
Nevada test site with approximately 25 generators. 12 point, or $12.63
per square foot. You go to some place like Barneswell, South Carolina,
it's $80 per square foot and $235 per cubic foot state surcharge.
That's money that's going directly into the state to benefit their
state.
Nevada test sites to get -- and this is '96 -- 55,000
shipments of low-level waste in the Nevada test site for the next ten
years. You talk about the transportation routes for Yucca Mountain. I
was on the site-specific advisory board. If you wanted to talk about
Yucca Mountain, what they reminded you of was the fact that you were in
a study phase. Yucca Mountain wasn't necessarily approved.
Transportation couldn't be an issue. Yet we have the same routes, the
same railroads, the same counties, only one direction to go. Why
couldn't we talk about transportation issues?
The WIPP in New Mexico gets $20 million immediately and
annually for 14 years -- that's $280 million -- because their
congressional delegation worked with the U.S. Congress on those equity
issues. Again, South Carolina, they receive $140 million annually,
state surcharge, on radioactive storage. Perhaps Nevada didn't hold out
the right hand, because maybe it could have been cost prohibitive for
nuclear waste to come here, had we pursued the fact that we want equity
entitlement benefits.
If I can just take another minute and then I'll get off of
this. Yes, increased funding to local units of government from the, for
local impact environmental studies to include credible oversight issue
funding. A, a world-class environmental and energy research center at
the University of Nevada; B, Federal funding for a state-of-the-art
emergency response program; C, water right issues for southern Nevada
growth; D, transition lease of Nevada's Federal lands to the state,
which is 86 percent Federal; E, funding for southern Nevada's
infrastructure and transportation systems; F, Nevada's university
research and educational funding. Two more. A stewardship trust fund
for grants to state and county identities for site and use of YMP as
studies conclude, as a repository during replacement operations, as a
monitor to the study area, and as a closure equity.
The last one I would say is, yes there is a lot of folks who
would like to see a rail line between northern and southern Nevada for
use as a means of moving high-level waste and low-level waste.
Number one, 13 of your 21 state senators are from Clark
County. That means 26 of your 42 state representatives are from Clark
County. All the money's basically in Clark County or hotels. You're
gonna play hell moving out nuclear waste through Clark County. But a
railroad system going north and south to the geographical center of
Nevada, yes, will upset people. The Bowawe, the Crescent Valley, the
Smokey Valley, Tonapar area, going on to the test site, it's doable.
But when that nuclear waste is hauled, what do you have? You have a
railroad system in the geographical center of the state of Nevada, to
open it up for issues, economic development, long beyond the emplacement
of that nuclear waste. It could be a benefit to the citizens of Nevada.
Thank you.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Bill. I guess what you're
suggesting on the last point is that there may be longer term benefits,
perhaps, to the state from at least one type of solution to the waste
disposal problem.
Do we have any other comments on transportation? I think we
did develop some ideas for the Advisory Committee that we'll come back
to at the end of the day, then I have two flip charts full and we'll put
those up on the walls for discussion and see what else we can get. But
are we, we about ready to take a break at this point? All right.
Let's try to come back a little bit after 4. That'll give
you 15-plus minutes and maybe we'll make up a little bit of time. I
think that a lot of the points that Steve was going to make have been
made --
[Laughter.]
MR. CAMERON: I'm not suggesting that you won't be on. I'm
just saying it might be shorter.
[Recess.]
MR. CAMERON: We're going to start off again with Steve
Frishman on why people distrust risk assessment. Now, I think you've
heard a lot of ideas along those lines already, but I'm gonna turn it
over to Steve and we'll see if we can put a finer point on this. Steve.
MR. FRISHMAN: I won't go through a lot of the things that
have been heard already and things that I had thought about talking
about, but I'll try to pull it together by maybe hitting some of the
points that haven't been hit and maybe we can get some bigger
generalizations out of it.
First of all, when people think about risk assessment, in
general it's at the time they're seeing the consequences of an accident.
And often -- and I know people who do this, they have literally
collections of press material for accidents that can't happen. And
there's lots of them and we're all well aware of that. So what happens
is they look at the consequence then they realize that, yeah, it was
likely because it happened. And then they get to the "what went wrong?"
part. And I think we all know superb examples of that from almost all
walks. I guess the most recent, most obvious was the Mars Planet Probe.
And that was a pretty simple one for what happened. Somebody had a
problem between English and metric units. But they probably announced
that even with that problem, they were only sixty miles off.
Then I was reading something, I guess today or yesterday,
saying that "almost" doesn't matter in risk assessment. If you're
flying from London to Boston, if you're even 600 feet off, you end up in
the Bay. and if you're a couple hundred feet off, you're very likely to
end up in the Bay.
So this is the way people are seeing risk assessments. They
generally notice the ones -- and I don't know whether it's a function of
where people get their information. But the ones that are most
noticeable usually have to do with human error. In performance
assessment or risk assessment, human factors are another story entirely.
And I think people understand that.
And one of the major elements in not trusting in risk
assessments is because you have human error that is sort of a separate
analysis, and that analysis is I guess related to what I was talking
about before, and the whole group was talking about. And that was this
idea of, "did you think of everything?" And very often, you thought of
everything except one thing. And that's the one thing that resulted in
the observation of the consequences. There may be other things that you
didn't think of, but at least that one was the cause of the problem.
Now John, you were talking about risk assessment and the
world that you live in. And I still think that there is some difference
-- and I'm not sure that I've analyzed it enough, but I think there's
some obvious components. There's some difference between what I might
refer to as industrial risk assessment and the level to which we're
pushing the same principles and methods for total system performance
assessment. I know, I remember quite a few years ago, this committee
held a couple-day meeting on risk assessment and just before that
meeting I had read what I thought was a really fascinating paper in
Science Magazine, where risk assessment was being applied to the design
of off-shore oil structures. The methodology was very tight; you could
also see that you could make design responses to the risks if you
thought it was economically worth it; and also safety factors for the
workers and so on. And it also came from a very, very large pot of
experience, where you knew pretty well what the parameters were that you
had to work with. Many of them had been tested and you make your
decisions about what level of safety you want.
But with GSPA, as has been noted by all of us throughout,
what we're pushing for, we're pushing for the future with essentially no
experience. And this makes me apprehensive, especially when I see that
the regulatory world is changing over to essentially entire reliance,
where as Part 60 with its subsystem performance requirements -- we were
looking at some deterministic approach. If you're looking for a site
for a repository, there, at least at the time Part 60 was written and
even at the time 191 was written, we were still thinking there must be
some attributes that probably have to be there in order to provide, if
nothing else, an indication of the level of knowledge that we had about
the site.
With performance assessment, we're all caught up -- Bob more
than anybody -- trying to figure out, among other things, what level of
knowledge is necessary, and then working with a model where maybe that
level of knowledge maybe gives you confidence in the model, and maybe it
doesn't. So I don't know whether you agree, John, or not, but I think
there's a fundamental difference. And it's disturbing that essentially
full reliance is going onto TSPA when there's, when the public just
doesn't have the faith in risk assessments, which are sort of the father
of this whole exercise. And you may never, using risk assessment or
total system performance assessment, you may never convince people that
you know enough.
This comes back to I think one of Paul's points, and that's
that decisions are alternately made on belief. And if people don't
believe the risk assessment or the performance assessment, then it just
isn't gonna happen probably.
There is another example that got me interested not too long
ago where, right now in the design there's very heavy reliance on the
waste package itself. And that reliance for a while was pretty
satisfactory from the standpoint of the assessors. But then the thought
was, well maybe we're relying too heavily on it without a sufficient
database, so what do we need to do, because you really can't get a
sufficient database in anywhere the time you have available. So what do
we do? Let's put another barrier there. And we really don't need it,
and I think I heard either Bob or one of his colleagues say that we
really don't think that we need it but it's a good idea to do it anyway.
So that again makes me kind of wonder why should we trust this total
system performance assessment when there are then sort of arbitrary
overlays put in because it might be wrong.
I guess we need to be more insistent, I think on the part of
all of us, insistent on the question that I raised before and we
discussed -- have we thought of everything. I know throughout this
program, in my experience, each time there is sort of a major change in
the thinking, it's presented as if everything has been thought of. This
gets pretty discouraging, you know, for the number of years that I've
been involved in it because in each case we can usually find something
that wasn't thought of, and then the result is either it doesn't matter
because the performance assessment and the sensitivity analysis shows
that it only represents a small part of the ultimate dose. So either it
doesn't matter or we'll come up with another Band-Aid.
The question is always going to be there and never really be
answerable until there's some kind of accident, about whether we've
thought of everything.
Another area where I think risk assessment enters into, or
risk assessment is impacted in the sense of how much you trust it, is in
the extent to which there is reliance on expert judgment and how much
extra judgment is cranked into the actual methodology and the actual
running of performance assessment. And I guess the only thing that I
can do in that area is quote something that Ralph Keany told this
program, the DOE program, a long time ago: "You just have to remember
that expert judgement is a state of knowledge, not a state of nature."
I think that has to be remember because often in this program, it's
used, I think, to describe a state of nature.
Back to the idea of having at least some deterministic
gateways. And I mentioned that I was, or I am, somewhat disturbed that
we're losing some system performance assessment, or subsystem
performance requirements. The examples don't lead to confidence at all,
and in fact probably reduce what confidence people may have in this very
long-term performance or risk assessment.
If you look at a few things that have happened in this
program, some of which we've been discussing all around today, one of
them is, why do we have a new EPA standard? We have a new EPA standard
because there came a time in the early '90s when it was apparent to
nearly everyone that Yucca Mountain would exceed the carbon-14 release
standard in 40 C.F.R. 191. And there was a long, pretty difficult
exercise that went on with trying to get the EPA to modify that
standard, and the EPA determined that it did not need to modify the
standard. The Department went to the National Academy's Board on
Radioactive Waste and the Board was not convinced that they would go
back for a change in the standard. So the Department went to Congress
and got he standard changed.
So here we have a standard that is a quantitative standard.
It was agreed to by a lot of people when it was first established and
now it's taken away and replaced by performance assessment. Now, what
would this tell a rational person? Is performance assessment going to
be as stringent as the rule that was thrown out? Obviously not, if it
was replaced by it.
We're in the process of looking at the -- well we have Part
63, which is a replacement for 60. And a good part of what's going on
in, or at least in part of the thinking in Part 63, is a response to a
fairly long-term demand by at least some parties that the subsystem
performance requirements have got to go. And now we see the Department
of Energy flipping back and forth on whether it's going to propose new
site recommendation guidelines. Well, that is because in the guidelines
there's a disqualifier that reflects one of those subsystem performance
requirements that the site probably can't meet, and that's groundwater
travel time. So again, we have a quantitative standard -- one that at
one point in time was generally agreed was good, if for no reason other
than to represent our level of knowledge of the proposed site. Again,
replaced by performance assessments. The question comes up, if you had
to throw out the rule that had a quantitative standard that either you
met or you didn't and replaced it with performance assessment, is it
more or less rigorous to use performance assessment? Obviously it's
gotta be less rigorous because the idea, or it's gotta be perceived to
be less rigorous because the perception is that the site would probably
pass through the performance assessment on the same types of factors.
So I guess I have brought out some different points, but
they're sort of the living points where, to date, you haven't had very
much public reaction to the type of risk assessment that's being applied
to this program because it's kind of a floating thing and not a lot of
people have been involved in watching it. The draft EIS is maybe the
first chance and it's probably surprising people, but there aren't that
many people who have actually even tried to delve into such an
intimidating subject, other than those of us who have to for one reason
or another.
I just want to, I guess, add one last point. And that is,
this year there was a conference in Stockholm that was called VALDOR,
and that's Values in Decisions on Risk. Some very interesting papers; I
recommend the proceedings to you. And I think on the EPA Yucca Mountain
page, there's a way to order the proceedings. It tells you who to talk
to, to order the proceedings.
SPEAKER: That's a different contract.
MR. FRISHMAN: Is it on the TRV?
SPEAKER: It's on the TRV.
MR. FRISHMAN: Okay, you're the one from the year before.
Well, anyway.
One of the things that I tried to explore in that meeting
was this whole question of transparency. And the reason that I went
into it was that I had made an observation that first transparency is
sort of a fad right now, and it's being, the word is being thrown in all
directions with different people meaning different things when they say
it. But it's just the thing that's supposed to be done now.
An observation that I made about the performance assessment
program for Yucca Mountain was that there was an implication that
transparencies means that it's right. And that began to disturb me a
little bit because it's very similar to the implication that if you do
all your quality assurance correctly, according to the right procedures
and so on, that the answer must be right. That isn't the case. Just as
with transparency, that isn't the case. And transparency also means
different things to different people. Transparency in the performance
assessment program in Yucca Mountain actually means what Abe was talking
about in terms of clarity, comprehensiveness, documentation,
traceability. But to other people, it means more than that. If you
look in my dictionary -- not everybody's dictionary has it, but I'm
fortunate enough to have a dictionary that includes in the definition of
transparency without corruption. And this is important in the sense
that transparency to the public means much more than just the mechanics
that Abe was talking about. What it means is that the process has been
open throughout on the way to a decision. And if you don't like the
word corruption, you can translate that to a transparent process from
the public standpoint is one that not only does all of those things, but
is also fair. And in risk assessment, you don't have a lot of room to
deal with the question of values and fairness being a value.
I'm sure that the reason for that conference was because
risk assessors are in a big dilemma, and it's over that exact situation.
And that's, how do values get applied into decisions on risk? In the
conference we didn't answer the question. We talked a lot about things
that may or may not help, just as today we've talked a lot about things
that may or may not help in getting additional involvement in the risk
assessment questions.
But there has got to be some way -- only because what's
happening right now is not working, and that's that in reality the
people who are most affected by decisions on risk are the ones who don't
trust the way those decisions were made. And like the people in
Crescent Valley will never trust how the decision was made if the rail
line comes through their valley. You can tell them all about risk; you
can say this was the lowest risk of all options. They're not gonna
believe that.
So in the end, I think it's important that you're looking at
the question, maybe coming from the standpoint of public involvement.
But what it really comes down to is this question that the conference
was after, and that's how do you incorporate values to the extent that
people, whether they agree or not with a decision, at least have some
confidence that all of the things that were important to them were
considered in that decision. And that comes back to, did you think of
everything? And the answer for the Yucca Mountain risk assessment or
performance assessment program is assuredly no. And the reason that
it's no is because there's no place to consider values.
I think I'll leave it at that. There are other places where
I could go but that fills in at least some of the gaps or at least makes
more explicit some of the things that were said.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you very much, Steve. That was
very thoughtful. I'm not sure that everybody will agree with your
points but --
MR. FRISHMAN: If they agreed with me, I'd be out of work.
[Laughter.]
MR. CAMERON: Now that's tempting.
[Laughter.]
MR. CAMERON: I'm sure that tempts a lot of people, but we
won't go there.
MR. FRISHMAN: Either that or you can buy a lot of
insurance.
MR. CAMERON: What I would suggest doing is that maybe --
I'm not sure I captured all of Steve's assessment of problems, and I put
solutions over here. I want to check with everybody to see whether they
agree -- first of all, whether I captured --
Then we have an ACNW advisory committee wrap-up session that I'm
going to ask Dr. Garrick to lead off, and maybe we can fold those last
two sessions together to talk about some of these recommendations that
we heard, but we're not going to go to the audience right now.
If you people around the table can indulge me on this list
of problems that Steve identified, maybe we can at least come up with a
taxonomy here.
The first point was -- of distrust is that -- well, the
whole idea of human error. You're going to miss something. Have we
thought of everything?
Does anybody have -- want to take issue with that? I mean
I'm talking about gross terms here. Does anyone object to the fact that
this is not a problem?
MR. VASCONI: Well, I don't think it's a problem. You know,
I'm one of the Americans that think that, between the National Academy
of Sciences, the NRC, the EPA, and several other organizations,
including the advisory board, my god, there's been a hell of a lot of
work done on Yucca Mountain.
I would like to have a penny for every piece of paper that's
been wasted at Yucca Mountain, let alone oversight, etcetera. I don't
know of any other country in this world that has gone to the efforts of
trying to please the people.
I also worked at the Nevada test site as a radiation
technician monitor when it was the Atomic Energy Commission. I see a
lot of response from DOE when you ask them questions. They don't want
to get caught in a mistake. They give me answers. They give a lot of
our folks answers.
Now, some of us might not be happy with them, but I see a
lot of cooperation going on, I see a lot of effort being made to make
this right, to make this work. There are others who are paid to say
what they do and the state is in opposition of Yucca Mountain.
MR. CAMERON: That's a fair point, Bill, and I'm going to
put that up here.
Let's go to Mal and then to Dave.
Mal?
MR. MURPHY: I agree with everything Bill said with respect
to the dedication and technical qualifications of the people involved in
the program, but that same thing was true about the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration, too, and they didn't have that final meeting
to sit down and say, now, are we dealing with metric or are we dealing
with English, and as a result, we all know what happened. We just
burned up a spaceship or whatever it was called that we sent somewhere.
So, I mean I think the answer is obvious.
MR. CAMERON: Perhaps a good illustration of the point.
MR. MURPHY: We may not have thought of everything.
I don't know whether we've thought of everything or we will
have thought of everything by the time Abe gets around to putting the
final cover on the license application, but I'm sure it's inconceivable
to him that he wouldn't have one final meeting to sit down and say --
and that meeting should involve everybody -- as many people as possible
to say have we thought of everything?
MR. CAMERON: Okay.
Abe?
MR. MURPHY: Are we talking metric or English here?
MR. VAN LUIK: I wasn't going to respond to each one of
these in particular. I wanted to make a couple of general statements,
but I'll wait until you give me the opportunity to do that.
On human error, I think when it comes to the transportation
and operational stages, there are genuine concerns about error.
I don't see not thinking of everything as a human error.
I see that as a process thing, that you involve as many
outside experts as you can find in giving you advice and looking over
your work and making sure that it includes pretty much what everyone
else will do, and in that sense, we cooperate, we're part of the Nuclear
Energy Agency in Paris, and we compare notes on features of processes
and those types of things.
But still, on the bottom rung, it's up to us to make the
case that we've thought of everything that could be important and either
dismissed it or incorporated it into our modeling, and I think that's
the application that Steve was getting at.
MR. CAMERON: Judy, do you want to comment on the problem?
MS. TREICHEL: Yeah. I think anytime that anybody announces
that they have ruled out any possibility of human error, they're
obviously wrong, and that you can't have a project, whether it involves
nuclear waste or anything, that has a potential for harm where a human
error can bring it down. It just can't be done that way or you have
disasters, but I also want you to take steering committee off.
MR. CAMERON: Is there no one here that thinks a steering
committee is -- because it's irrelevant to me as the facilitator. Is
there no one who thinks that a steering committee might be a solution to
did you think of everything?
Abe?
MR. VAN LUIK: Actually, we don't call it that, but I think
the process that I described where we, each time, start over and bring
in all the experts working on the process level and then work up --
that's exactly the purpose for that, is to say have you learned anything
since this last time that would cause you to rethink the way that we're
handling this, and so, we do make a consistent effort at trying for
that, but obviously, there could be unknown unknowns out there, which by
definition are unknown.
MR. CAMERON: And that's your internal model.
MR. VAN LUIK: Yes.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Do you need something like that from
the standpoint of the public, I guess, is the question.
MR. MURPHY: Well, remember, you know, that's the purpose of
the licensing process, too. I'm surprised Bill didn't jump in on this,
too.
[Laughter.]
MR. MURPHY: Let's face it. The ultimate did-you-think-of-
everything question, I guess, is the one -- is posed by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission before they issue a construction authorization.
MR. CAMERON: Bill.
MR. REAMER: Well, I guess I would look at it a little bit
differently.
I would be concerned about an attitude that was expressed by
any applicant or licensee that said we've discounted human error, we've
looked at everything, we're sure that human error is not a problem, and
we're sure that we've thought of everything.
I think that we need attitudes that are always looking at
those two questions, that are looking at experience and evaluating
experience and deciding whether there are any lessons to be learned
about human activity.
Mistakes can happen in the process that are harmless
mistakes, but we should look at those closely, we should try to learn
from them, and we should evaluate our processes all the time, and the
same thing with respect to have we thought of everything.
I think the attitude that we want to see -- or at least this
is my personal view -- is a humble attitude that says we are always
looking, we are always evaluating, we're looking for more.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Humility plays a role, actually, and
I'm taking steering committee off before I get in trouble.
DR. GARRICK: I object.
MR. CAMERON: All right. Well, that's good enough. Thank
you, Dr. Garrick.
DR. GARRICK: Let me just make the following point.
Whenever I hear a position taken on Site A that's adamant,
whether it's pro or con, that gives me pause for thought as to why, and
I think the -- all we're suggesting here is that, in a very important
application involving billions of dollars and very fundamental to our
economy, the steering committee concept -- and you can call it some
other name -- appeared to serve a very important conduit or mechanism
for public participation in a highly technical process, and so, as a
candidate solution, I don't see how logic would say that you have to
eliminate it.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. And that's all -- I think
that is a very, very good articulation of the only significance that
this has. Okay. So, I think that was great.
Fred.
MR. DILGER: I'd just like to make a couple of points.
First is that I don't think we can afford to discount human
error at all and organizational error, but the political scientist Aaron
Dabsky made the point that there probably wasn't any -- that after a
certain point, there was no -- you were not going to get much return on
your investment trying to anticipate every possible thing that could
wrong in an organization, and so, he argued that you should create a
system that will respond to events effectively rather than trying to --
rather than spend a lot of time and energy trying to anticipate
everything, and that's something that should have -- that I think is
worth looking at.
There's been a lot of new work about high reliability or
highly reliable organizations -- aircraft carriers, emergency rooms,
that kind of thing -- where people are brought in from all over the
place and work together effectively over long periods of time, and this
is the kind of organizational analysis that probably needs to be done
for a Yucca Mountain -- at least, certainly, the Yucca Mountain
transportation program.
MR. CAMERON: And what would you label that, this
organizational analysis you're talking about? A high reliability?
MR. DILGER: How about -- an old term is organizational
effectiveness.
MR. CAMERON: So, I can list that over here? You would
suggest that?
MR. DILGER: Yes.
MR. CAMERON: All right.
Abe.
MR. VAN LUIK: In order to move this along a little faster,
can I object to the breakouts which Steve Frishman created, which I
think confuses some issues that are totally related and unrelated at the
same time? Can I make a political statement and then maybe everybody
else argue with it and we can be done with five of those at the same
time?
MR. CAMERON: Should we just eliminate these without the the
polemical statement? No, I'm kidding. I think that that's fine.
Take all of this with a lot of grains of salt, because we
don't have the time to try to go through the methodology to -- but you
know, I think maybe the most important point is to see if we all agree
on this identification of -- Steve's take on the problem.
So, why don't you go ahead and say what you want to say?
MR. VAN LUIK: All right. And then I'll truly be quiet.
The full reliance on risk assessment to ESPA -- I think if
you read the NRC and the EPA proposed standards, you will see that an
important part of the decision is relying on risk assessment to ESPA.
However, there are the requirements for showing multiple
barriers, and there are other things in there, and on top of that -- and
this leads me to objecting to the -- whatever is under your arm right
there.
On top of that, the arbitrary overlays -- one of the reasons
--
MR. CAMERON: I wasn't sure what that was. I'm sorry.
MR. VAN LUIK: One of the reasons that we went to this
arbitrary overlay of a drip shield is because we looked at the VA.
We saw a 10,000-year performance was very good. We saw that
there was a lot of uncertainty largely because of the potential for
dripping which we didn't have quantified to the point where we felt we
had enough uncertainty, so we created an uncertainty shield.
We called it a drip shield, but it's really an uncertainty
shield, and to say that that's arbitrary -- what we said was we did the
analysis, but we are not as confident of that analysis as we feel we
should be.
Therefore, we will add in this additional protection, and
that gives us more confidence in the results of the TSPA.
So, it's doing exactly what I think is required in terms of
giving an extra layer of confidence.
Now, the expert knowledge over-emphasis -- for the VA, we
used some expert elicitation to give us model parameters, etcetera. As
fast as we can, we're moving away from that and building a base in data,
but let's not forget that we can't worship data either. It needs to be
interpreted, it needs to be set into its context, and you can take all
the core data that you want at a very small scale, but it will tell you
very little about mountain-scale property.
So, everything that we do in terms of data also requires the
expert judgement of internal experts, which we like to fortify with
outside experts, also.
DR. GARRICK: Just a comment, as a practitioner, I'd like to
make the observation that more gross errors in risk assessments have
come from errors in logic than have come from insufficient data. You
can change a logic gate and change the answer by several orders of
magnitude with one mistake on the logic gate. You can make all kinds of
errors on data input and not have the same impact on the bottom line
result.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you very much.
DR. GARRICK: So, the issue is not just data. It's data
plus the structure, how the thing works, and being able to represent
exactly how the system operates.
MR. VAN LUIK: And going right back to the top, did you get
enough input from various biases or belief systems to give you the
indication that you've covered the major potential effects on the
system.
On the political override thing, I think it's wonderful that
the EIS has been discussed here, the DEIS. We are not taking comments
here. I hope all these comments will come to us in the proper process,
but the point of the whole environmental impact statement process is to
disclose the risk.
It's not to make the decision on what is going to be the
route or what is going to be the approach. It's to disclose to the
decision-makers who can then add in their other values, which is that
last point, in finally making those decisions.
And then, on the delta in the rules, I think that was an
unfortunately shortsighted comment on the part of Steve, and I've told
him this before.
When we look at the EPA standard, DOE did object on the
basis of the carbon-14 was going to cost us billions to show compliance
with, although we thought we could, yet the risk to the population was
so low that it really didn't make much sense.
You multiply a very small number by 10 billion people, which
was the assumed population for the world over 10,000 years, and sure,
you get a large number.
I must compliment in the EPA. In the DID, the statement
that accompanies the proposed standard -- I recommend you all read it --
they do a very nice analysis of the carbon-14 releases and show
basically that it's a very small impact on the local community and,
therefore, much smaller on the communities farther away.
The real reason that I personally like the new standard is
because it protects the people most likely to be affected.
The old standard allowed releases to a certain point in the
geosphere based on generic assumptions about a site having ground water
and surface water dilution and making an impact on the world.
I have been quoted -- and I will never say this again --
that the old standard allowed people to be fried in the vicinity of
Yucca Mountain, even though it protected the world. That turns out to
be an overstatement.
However, if you take the releases allowed by the old 10 CFR
191 and do not dilute them and bring them directly to Amargosa Valley,
those people at 20 kilometers receive whopping doses, and so, I think
the people of Nevada and the people of Amargosa Valley should thank the
EPA for correcting this in a site-specific manner for Yucca Mountain,
and it was the right thing to do from that perspective.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you.
Let me check in with Dr. Garrick and the group here at this
point.
We have Mr. Dials with us, who is going to do a
presentation, and we have wrap-up that I think would be useful to do to
go through some of the things we have heard about the advisory
committee, what recommendations or issues they might want to explore to
see if we agree with them, disagree, want to amplify on them, and I
don't think that we can really close later than quarter to six or six at
the latest, because we do have a public meeting that's going to start at
seven, and we have to do some room rearranging, things like that.
Should we close this discussion down now, go to Mr. Dials,
and then come back and wrap up on these recommendations?
Dr. Garrick, what's your pleasure?
DR. GARRICK: I think we'll want to hear what Ray Clark has
to say, and then, yes, I think it's very important for us to get to Mr.
Dials, because I think he does have an important message for us.
MR. CAMERON: All right. Good.
Ray?
MR. CLARK: First of all, I take exception to the fact that
people would get fried in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain under our
standards.
I assume you're referring to the release limits in 191?
There was also an individual protection standard in that regulation,
which was 15 millirem -- it is now. So, there are two parts to that.
For one thing, I think I heard Steve say that we've now
switched to PA, which we didn't do in 191. Maybe I missed your point.
But we did use PA or refer to -- maybe we didn't use the term, that we
talked about some other definition.
Finally, since Steve raised it, I will throw a quick
advertisement in here.
About a year ago, we did cosponsor a symposium in Stockholm
for environment regulation. It was -- we think -- was the first time a
meeting was held for international environmental regulators, and that
was cosponsored with the Swedish Radiation Protection Institute, which
is the equivalent of my office in Sweden, and the Stockholm Environment
Institute, which is a non-profit organization in Stockholm, and yes, the
directions for ordering that proceeding is on our web-site.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks a lot, Ray, and thanks to Steve
for taking the time to give this some thought. Not everybody agrees
with the identification of the problems, but at some point, trying to
work through this might be a useful exercise.
But at any rate, let's bring George Dials up to talk about
the WIPP experience and public environment.
MR. DIALS: My name is George Dials. I'm the president and
general manager of TRW Environmental Safety Systems, which is the M&O
for the Yucca Mountain project, and I'm not here today to talk to you
about Yucca Mountain. I'm here to talk about a public outreach approach
and successes that were related to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
For a number of years, I was a senior executive in the
Department of Energy, for about six years, exactly. I spent most of
that time in Carlsbad, New Mexico, working on the Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant project. I was also the manager for the national trans-uranic
waste program, which was the umbrella activity under which the WIPP
facility rested.
I want to talk a little bit about the approaches we took at
that project in terms of communicating very broadly with the public and
trying to achieve some measure of understanding of one another's mutual
views, perspective, and interest on a very important national program,
and I'm glad to know -- and I'm sure you've had some very interesting
discussions today on risk and risk assessment and different perspectives
on risk, and I'm sorry I missed that. It's one of my personal
interests, and I dealt with Dr. Garrick for many years in the past on
this issue related to WIPP.
I'm glad to recognize that not many of us are truly
committed to living in a risk-free world or we wouldn't be here at this
meeting today. I had to come down through the spaghetti bowl from my
office. I can tell you that's certainly not a risk-free activity in any
measure of the word "risk."
I want to go through some overheads with you, and I've got
just some slides here that have a lot of words on them, and I'll try to
talk you through it and hope they generate your thinking and some
questions.
One of the things we had to do with the Waste Isolation
Pilot Plant project was to re-baseline the activity and the approach. I
was asked in October 1993 to undertake a management assessment of what
was going on with the program and to try to help chart a path forward to
licensing the facility.
I was at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory at that
time as one of the assistant managers running a group of activities
there, and it demonstrated some ability to communicate with the public
and to understand their perspective and solve problems.
As a result of my participation there -- and it wasn't my
decision-making, necessarily, that led to these results, but it was an
activity I was pleased to be a part of -- some very specific decisions
were made that put us on a path to dealing with public perceptions of
the WIPP project and regulatory and licensing issues related thereto.
We decided to establish a new Department of Energy
organization committed specifically and totally to dealing with the
issues related to the national trans-uranic waste program, and we called
that the Carlsbad Area Office, and it reported directly into the
Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management, Tom Grumbly at that
time, with a reporting line also to Secretary Hazel O'Leary.
We also put the authority and the responsibility into that
office and into the manager's hands in that office. There wasn't a lot
of bureaucratic overlay in terms of impedance to the decision-making.
We were charged with specifically focusing on the regulatory
licensing and stakeholder issues related to the site and to deal with
their concerns and with the regulatory and licensing requirements.
We canceled a much maligned, criticized on-site testing
program to introduce containers, drums of trans-uranic waste underground
in bins to do some gas generation testing and other sort of testing
which we believe was a flawed approach to sort of short-circuit the
licensing regulatory process, and we committed openly and frequently to
greater public involvement in decision-making processes and began the
effort to engender that very quickly. It is not an easy thing to do
when you enter a organization that is greatly distrusted by the public.
I remember one meeting very well in Santa Fe where I was
introduced by the state regulatory agency, the secretary of the energy
and minerals department at the time, as the new manager of the WIPP
project and was informed shortly thereafter by some of the activist
groups that they've had seven previous managers of the WIPP project,
none of whom they believed, why should they believe me, and my response,
I thought, was focused and accurate: You shouldn't believe me until I
demonstrate through my actions that what I tell you is what I will do,
and we started from there.
It was not a smooth road, it wasn't easy, but we did get
there.
We did, in our communications plan, develop some focused
themes that we consistently talked about. We reminded everyone,
including ourselves, why we were doing what we were doing.
We reminded everyone, including our oversight committees --
we had an independent oversight group that had been in existence for
many years in New Mexico that was independently funded, was
independently operated, it's had the same director for 18 years now, a
gentleman named Dr. Bob Neil.
We informed the WIPP panel of the National Academy of
Sciences and all the other interested groups that we were working on a
serious national problem, and our mandate was very simple, to try to
develop a solution to the problem that minimized the risk to the
nation's population.
We communicated our concerns about worker safety and the
safety of the public and our commitments to those.
We talked about the very importance of dealing with this
issue in terms of meeting other national imperatives that had been
publicized, publicized, publicized, and communicated by the new
Secretary of Energy and her assistant secretaries, and that was this
very important goal of cleaning up the weapons complex sites, and I
can't remember who the author was, but I remember the book quite well,
which I read -- it's "Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in
Kindergarten."
One of the very important lessons there was clean up your
own mess. Well, the mess we're talking about cleaning up is a very
difficult mess, but it's one that we are responsible for, not my
grandchildren or great-grandchildren or their grandchildren.
We are responsible for it. We have an ethical, moral
imperative to deal with the problem we have created which put -- and I
believe I'm the first one that communicated this in terms that I could
understand and that my mother, who lives in West Virginia, with an
eighth-grade education could understand -- that within a 50-mile radius
of all the trans-uranic waste sites, where we had de facto interim
storage facilities and still have them today, live 53 million Americans.
That's a lot of the population. If you look at the number of people who
live within the sites that Yucca Mountain is concerned about, that
number goes up considerably.
So, it is a national problem. WIPP was a national problem.
Trans-uranic waste storage and disposal is a national problem we should
all be concerned about.
Our attempts to identify public key concerns were difficult
at best. It was interesting that, as Winston Churchill said, you know,
speaking of the United States and England, two great nations separated
by a common language, we find that the groups who are interested broadly
in these issues are very diverse and we do not speak the same language.
Scientists and engineers, in fact, don't speak the same
language. Political scientists and social scientists don't speak the
same language. Regulators and license applicants do not speak the same
language.
So, we have a difficulty in communicating about these issues
that makes it very incumbent upon us to maintain open communication
lines even when we are talking past one another, and we need to have
some way to bridge those communication lines so we finally focus in on
what the issues are. It's difficult, at best.
We found that personal safety and environmental impacts due
to storage were important but not the overriding consideration of most
of the public interest groups are involved in this issue.
As I've heard just briefly this afternoon, the primary issue
and concern that became the issue and concern as identified in every
environmental impact statement -- and by the way, we did three
environmental impact statements for WIPP -- the first one to select the
site, the second one to do the construction of the research facilities,
and the third one to actually select the site for disposal.
So, we had lots of opportunity for hearings and
communication and do these alternative assessments and define the risk
of those judgements, and as Abe has said, in the NEPA process, if you go
back to the fundamental rationale for it, it's a decision-making tool to
help identify all the risks.
It isn't the decision-making document whether you open the
facility.
But we found that the public's primary concern was
transportation, transportation, transportation, and we dealt with it in
a very focused way, and I am pleased to have heard here this afternoon
some recognition that we did some things right and there's some value in
looking at the transportation protocols and the systems set up at WIPP
for some guidance on how to do it for other programs.
We found it very important that the key decision-makers in
all of our activities not only within the government -- and I was a DOE
official at that time, I'm not a DOE official now, so if it sounds like
I say something about setting national policy or policy related to WIPP
or Yucca Mountain or anything else, forgive me.
I am no longer a national policy setter. April will keep me
straight. I'm now in the private sector, and I defer the national
policy-making to Lake Baird and the other people who run the program on
Yucca Mountain and now to the folks who run the WIPP project.
But it is critically important that the people who are
setting national policy and who are setting the policies that the
stakeholder groups respond to are informed, that we all have the same
hymnal, so to speak, whether we're all singing in the same tune or not.
We took extraordinary measures to ensure that every bit of
information that I had at my disposal was made available to the public.
This was not an easy task, and it met with some resistance from those
who held the view that the public didn't always understand all the
technical documents.
I thought my response was very appropriate, said hell I
don't understand them all either, but I still get them.
So, you've got to share the information. Exclusion is a
great sin when you're dealing with these sort of issues. Inclusion is
the way to go, and inclusion in terms of distributing the information is
critical.
You have to realize, as has been said here, that the
stakeholder groups who are very interested and who feel that they may be
most adversely affected do not necessarily have the same resources you
do to access information. So, it takes extraordinary measures to make
sure the information is available.
One of the things we did when we produced the license
application that went to our regulators, Environmental Protection
Agency, we produced a citizen's guide to the compliance application
document.
We made the application available to everybody. The citizen
guide helped us understand what it contained, and I'm sure it helped the
citizens who were interested in what was contained in those tens of
thousands of pages also to know what was there and where to find it.
We found that, although we were able, often, to generate
participation in our meetings, that trans-uranic waste shipment and
disposal was not necessarily a high priority on all the stakeholders'
lists of things to worry about, particularly when they were distant from
New Mexico.
It was much more focused in New Mexico, particularly in
Albuquerque and Santa Fe, in terms of environmental groups who were
concerned about what the State was trying to do and the Federal
Government was trying to do with opening the facility, and in Carlsbad,
which was, interestingly enough, a very supportive and pro-actively
supported population base, basically, who sought the siting of the
facility in Carlsbad early on and supported it throughout the efforts to
get it licensed, the mayor was apt to tell folks there that he ran on a
pro-WIPP opening platform and got 89 percent of the vote.
So, it was -- although there were some folks who opposed the
facility, it was, by and large, supported by the local community.
The challenges and focus areas for us became fairly evident.
We focused our activities on our neighboring communities in New Mexico.
That's where our most active stakeholders on a day-to-day basis were.
The Environmental Evaluation Group, which was the
independent oversight group, funded through one of the state
universities and independent -- it has one time been established as part
of the State Government, it was under the environment department, but it
was found that there was too much politics to play in that sort of
organizational construct, and it was removed to the university system,
which while -- most people tell me university systems are fairly
political -- it's certainly somewhat immune from the day-to-day politics
that goes on around the statehouse.
Bob Neil is still the director of that group. He could be
available, if anybody's interested, I'm sure, to talk about their
involvement and role that they played.
The other stakeholder groups were based primarily in
Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Albuquerque, of course, is the largest city.
That's the population base. It's also the location of the waste in New
Mexico.
You know, until WIPP opened last May, there was no waste in
Carlsbad, it was all in Albuquerque or Los Alamos and traveling the road
through Santa Fe up to Los Alamos or down to Sandia Labs often.
We focused some attention there. We enhanced our
cooperative relationships with organizations in the communities that
were interested in hearing about the project and why it was important.
We presented our rationale for -- and made the technical and
safety and scientific basis that supports the safety case that this was
the right thing to do in the national interest, that it truly minimized
the risk and would minimize the risk to large numbers of folks who were
potentially exposed to any sort of radioactive releases that might occur
at these temporary storage facilities, and got some understanding, I
believe, that there was a rational approach and rationale for doing what
we were proposing.
We took on the -- in the national outreach effort, there was
a need to communicate with the states and the interest groups around the
sites, where there was large -- there were large quantities of trans-
uranic waste in temporary storage.
This includes most of the national laboratory systems and
other -- in the system, and other sites such as Savannah River, Hanford,
Oak Ridge.
It was interesting that the -- while the trans-uranic waste
issues, compared to the other issues they were worried about there, like
high-level waste disposal or nuclear materials, other nuclear materials
disposal, or nuclear weapons storage activities were not really high on
their priority list, because in comparison, the radiation exposure risk
-- again, this is a -- goes to perception of risk, and it differed for
each site -- were much lower than, say, at Hanford, the liquid high-
level waste in the tanks that were gurgling.
So, we took the programs to them, talked about where we were
in the scientific basis, engaged the site-specific advisory boards at
each of those sites in terms of our activities and our scientific and
technical baseline and the regulatory issues related to what we're
trying to do and the transportation issues.
One of the big differences in the program related to trans-
uranic waste and the program related to high-level waste is we did, in
fact, start early and focused and worked it often on the transportation
side.
The WIPP transportation protocols were negotiated over a
long period of time with the governors of the states affected by the
transportation activities and the state agencies in those states.
We did have protocols put in place with the Western
Governors Association initially, the Southern States Energy Board, and
the Southern Governors Association, and the National Governors
Association, which defined the extra-regulatory and the regulatory
things we would do to ensure safe transportation of trans-uranic waste
through their states.
There was, obviously, a role played by the Department of
Transportation in terms of helping define and select the most
appropriate transportation routes. These were, in fact, then,
coordinated with each state and selected and approved by each state.
We did training in each location in terms of emergency
response. We did training in terms of communications and tracking of
transportation shipments.
We did find, because we started early -- and this is a
lessons learned, I think, that could apply in any other sort of campaign
to move radioactive materials -- that you can start the emergency
response training programs too soon. I have found, through that
experience, that there is high turnover in most emergency response teams
in most states and cities, locations.
So, you can train the people who are gone by the time you
start the campaign if you don't have a planned, focused effort to do the
training. It's almost just-in-time training in some senses.
But we did actually have very good response in working with
the states and the emergency response and safety professionals in each
state, including the state police in most cases, who had a very
prominent role there.
That includes our interactions with the State of Nevada in
terms of training and agreement on the protocols for WIPP shipments.
There is a document called a PIG, which is the protocol
implementation guideline, that is available to everyone that could give
you some idea of the way we went about the transportation planning,
route designation, and emergency response training systems and also the
way we went about the exercise program and funded the programs.
From Los Alamos, once you get out of Los Alamos County,
you're on Pueblo land, on a state highway but on Pueblo land -- at the
Pueblo fire department, we add exercises where they, in fact, operated
as a first responder and did extraordinarily well.
I think I've covered some of the institutional programs. We
did talk about the governors associations, those sorts of things.
It's very important to engage the institutional groups in
meaningful participation.
Without the support of the institutions that represent the
governors, we would not have been able to effect the sort of successful
protocols that had been used for other waste shipping campaigns
successfully in addition to the WIPP campaigns.
International interactions were important because we, as you
have suggested, were very concerned about making sure we had covered
everything.
The United States is not alone in dealing with this
difficult complex problem of nuclear waste disposal. Every nation in
the world that has a nuclear program, be it a weapons program, a defense
program, or a civilian reactor program or research program, has the
problem of what to do with nuclear waste.
We are, in fact, a leader in dealing with this issue.
It was important to me to engage the International Atomic
Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency, which is part of the
Organization of Economic Community Development that's based in Paris --
the IAEA is based in Vienna as a UN agency -- engage those two entities
in an overview of our program.
At some risk to the program and with great concern expressed
by our regulator, the EPA, who wasn't sure this was such a good idea, I
negotiated an agreement, with the blessing of my bosses in DOE
headquarters, with the IAEA and NEA to do a joint international review
of the technical and scientific baseline and regulatory baseline for our
program.
This review was conducted by internationally recognized
experts, world-class scientists and engineers, and risk assessors, and
confirmed for us that we had, in fact, dealt with the major issues.
There were some things brought up that we had not thought of
but we were able to deal with and able to address in a meaningful way.
So, the international view and the international cooperation
is important. The Secretary of Energy, in fact, has announced a big
international conference that's taking place at the end of this month
and the first of November in Denver to pull in the leaders of the
international program.
One of the things we addressed in those sort of
collaborations -- and we included the stakeholders in all of these
activities.
When I talk about our activities and what we're engaged in,
it included invitations to the Environmental Evaluation Group, a long
list of stakeholders who expressed an interest in being involved,
including Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, Citizens Against
Radioactive Dumping, the Sierra Club, all of the groups who have an
interest in this, and local citizen groups, rotary clubs, whatever the
group was, to be involved.
We were very inclusive, which sometimes takes a lot of
effort and patience, because as your meetings do, a lot of people need
to be heard and you want to hear everybody and you want to deal with the
issues.
See, Paul Davis, from Sandia, was involved in an effort that
we undertook very early, that he helped invent, in fact, that was very
successful in dealing with stakeholder perspectives on the scientific
and technical baseline of the program.
We went through a prioritization program called the systems
prioritization method and published the reports on this where we
revisited the technical baseline for the program to help prioritize the
important parameters or important research activities that needed to be
undertaken.
We invited all the stakeholder groups to participate in
that, and they participated very well, in large part, and provided some
very useful insights that we were able to use to prioritize our
scientific and technical program as we were moving towards finalizing
the performance assessment, same process you will use in Yucca Mountain,
the total systems performance assessment, to demonstrate compliance and
support the compliance case with the regulatory program that EPA had
established.
Our communication plan was proactive, rather than being an
advocate or reactive. We were proactive in anticipation of future
problems and proactive in bringing people to the table to discuss the
issues.
We were firm in our belief that our scientific and technical
baseline was sound and we had dealt with the issues, but we were
frequently addressing concerns and issues that were brought up by
stakeholder groups and reporting back when we took actions in response
to their concerns.
We, in fact, did change, in the process of doing the systems
prioritization method, some of the approaches we were taking to dealing
with issues.
We built relationships of trust because we were
communicating.
That doesn't mean we agreed always with the path forward,
but we always worked on a professional way to honestly address the
concerns that were raised and created a two-way communication channel
that made it timely to exchange concerns and address concerns.
At the end of the effort, as the compliance application was
going in, we called together a special group, including representatives
from the environmental groups, to address a list of issues that were
first formulated by this group but were defined as issues that had been
put on the table that had not been adequately addressed and spent a lot
of time with a group that had come together, were chosen by their
representative organizations to deal with the issues.
We wanted no issue left that had not been addressed. That
did not mean we reached consensus on our compliance application or on
the decision to open the facility.
There are still groups in New Mexico who oppose the Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant and think it should never have opened.
We encourage technology transfer. We were very proactive in
seeking an opportunity to interact in public forum. We participated
openly in all the EIS activities. We had many hearings and made an
effort to ensure that all interested groups were recognized and
participated.
Again, this is not an easy take to undertake, and there are
contentious issues, and there are honest differences of opinion about
what is the right thing to do with nuclear waste.
One of the things we tried to do is to get us all working
from the same frame of reference. For example, in the regulations that
the EPA put in place for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the standards,
after 150 years we had to assume in the performance assessment and in
our operation of the facility that we would lose institutional control
of the facility.
Now, there was no more definition of the underlying
assumptions for that, but if you assume that the U.S. Government loses
institutional control of a Federal facility, then, in our view, we must
assume that, if you had the no-action alternative, the same assumption
should be applied.
That is, we want to get on an equal basis of assessing the
risk and the impacts.
So, as we addressed that issue, we found that was the one
that was most difficult for some groups to accept, and we would say
that, if you assume we lose, in New Mexico, institutional control of
WIPP, then we've also lost institutional control of Sandia and all those
very critical materials that are there, and institutional control of Los
Alamos, where we have thousands of drums of trans-uranic waste and much
more highly-radioactive materials in temporary storage, and then assess
the comparative risk of each of those.
We opened an office in Santa Fe, and I've already gone
through a lot of this. We assigned staff particularly to deal with
this.
We found one of the things we weren't communicating very
clearly with the public -- as many of you know, New Mexico is a
bilingual state, by and large, particularly the northern part of the
state. We didn't have any fluent Hispanic speakers on our staff when I
first got there.
We changed that very quickly when we opened the office and
found that to be a very effective way to engender broader participation
in the discussions and debate from the small communities throughout
northern New Mexico who also had a voice and thought they would be
adversely affected by the decisions that were being made.
We partnered with Los Alamos in northern New Mexico on some
things in terms of dealing with the technical issues. We didn't
necessarily partner with them on dealing with all the public issues.
Los Alamos, as it were, is very highly respected from a
technical/scientific standpoint, but they're accused often of being
unreliable partners in the community and unresponsive to broader
community needs. I think we helped them recognize some of that and deal
with it.
It was very important, though, that we -- I think the most
important step, actually, was to open the office up there and to be
there every day and be available and open to all the citizens, no matter
how they felt about the program, and all our data, all the computers
were there, they could get access to a computer, they had access to all
the compliance documents, they had access to the database, they had
access to staff who would make sure they got information and could
answer their questions.
I think our winning strategy -- and this is winning strategy
in the sense of dealing with public issues, in communicating with the
public, and in moving the project forward -- was simply this: We had
focused leadership with the authority and responsibility to take the
actions necessary to deal with public issues.
We demonstrated a best-in-class. We were the first DOE
facility to get a volunteer protection status gold star award, which is
a commercial OSHA safety award that made us self-regulating.
We figured if we couldn't demonstrate that we were concerned
about the safety of our own staff, why should the public believe we're
concerned about their safety?
We had some excellent environmental programs and activities.
We had a well-integrated organization in the sense that our
team of scientists, engineers, public affairs people, social scientists,
legal staff were integrated in line with the same vision and mission and
the same commitment to public outreach.
It didn't take more than one complaint from the public about
somebody being obtuse, uncooperative, or demeaning to have them removed.
We implemented a sound science and engineering program in
which the public had some input through the systems prioritization
method, primarily, and some groups were very adept at raising and
pushing technical issues, and we had to address those and did so
successfully.
We had a very detailed and aggressive schedule -- and I'm
going to show you that in a minute -- which included the stakeholder
involvement pieces.
So, the interactions with the public were as important on
our schedule and were statused every month and conducted every month,
every week as they were scheduled. The public saw that and, I think,
appreciated being on the schedule, first of all, and then appreciated us
statusing and making sure that those things were done.
We had frequent regulator interactions, and many of those
meetings -- not all of them, because we did respond to our regulators'
desire, and one axiom of licensing that I have learned in my career --
and I've licensed lots of things, from coal mine preparation plants to
coal mines to helping license the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
One axiom of licensing, of regulator interactions is you
give the regulator what they want. So, my NRC friends are here, I know.
We'll give you what you want, and we won't argue with you
about whether you need it or not.
And frequent stakeholder outreach and involvement -- and I
do have -- I'll show you this. This is a very busy slide, but I want
you to see that the stakeholder piece was on there and statused just
like every other important piece of the program, had equal high
priority.
We were dealing with the public for whom we worked,
actually, and their involvement was critical to our success.
I believe we did some things that provide some lessons
learned. We did not do all of these things without making a lot of
mistakes.
We did have some very contentious meetings and briefings
with both regulators and activist groups, but our disagreements were
always honest and always in the open, and we were, I think, very
religious in responding to requests for information and getting back to
people when there was an issue that was raised.
If we didn't agree with you, you knew about it up front, as
soon as we had an opportunity to deal with the issue.
I'm happy to be here today. I'll be happy to answer any
questions, John, if that's appropriate.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you. We would thank you for the
terrific presentation. You touched on a lot of issues that the people
around the table have been talking about. I would apologize for all of
us for our being sort of behind in schedule, because I know that we'd
love to keep you here with questions. I think we'll have to keep that
pretty minimal at this point.
MR. DIALS: I've got another meeting to go to, too.
MR. CAMERON: Mike?
MR. BAUGHMAN: I was just curious, George. Your disposal
decision plan shows that interactions with the EEG and with the NAS were
probably more frequent than any other interactions that you had, just
summing these up. I wonder if you could just characterize the role that
the EEG played in this program and in, you know, resolving technical
questions, things of that matter.
MR. DIALS: Well, that's a good question.
We didn't list all the things in there. There's a piece of
the thing that was missing where we had other groups listed who
participated in these. So, the EEG group were quarterly meetings that
were open to the public, and they were often the genesis for other
public groups to come in and be involved.
So, EEG activities were established early in the program.
It was felt by the State of New Mexico, once the AEC,
initially, and then ERTA, then DOE got the program going, that they
needed some independent technical oversight group that could address the
program and represent the state's best interest.
It was initially created as an arm of or adjunct to the
environment department, New Mexico Environment Department.
Bob Neil was selected as the first director. He's been the
first and only director. He's still the director today.
The funding for the program was from the Department of
Energy initially, through the environment department, but with no
ability or opportunity to sort of direct their work.
We didn't review their reports. We received them and
responded to them, but we had no draft reviews or anything like that.
At one point, there was an attempt made to politicize some
of the activities in the '80s, early '80s, and a decision was taken by
the Congressional delegation, Senator Dominici and Senator Bingaman, to
remove it from the environment department and move it under the
university group, and it maintained the same role and organizational
structure. Bob Neil remained the director.
They were funded through New Mexico Tech and had the same
obligation to review and comment upon the technical scientific baseline
for the repository.
MR. CAMERON: What was the composition of -- we've been
talking about steering committees and things like that. What was the
composition of the EEG?
MR. DIALS: The EEG is largely Ph.D., Masters-degreed
scientists and engineers. I think the staff was up to about 16 people
at one time, a budget of about $2 1/2 million.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. So, scientific expertise rather than,
for example, a group of affected -- representatives of affected
interests.
MR. DIALS: That's right. That particular group had that
mandate.
They did interact and act as a catalyst for other groups, of
course, and were a resource and often called on by other groups to
explain and address issues of concern.
MR. CAMERON: And maybe the same type of catalyst that the
advisory committee could perhaps serve, and I think that that's what's
being explored here.
MR. DIALS: I think it was an effective organization in
terms of dealing with technical scientific issues and holding our feet
to the fire in terms of transparency and dealing with the issues in a
way that they felt were fully resolved.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Well, that's great, Mr. Dials. I guess
we probably should move on to our wrap-up, but we thank you very much
for the presentation.
[Applause.]
MR. CAMERON: We're going to sort of combine the last two
items on the agenda, which is the advisory committee role and a
discussion of what the advisory committee might do in terms of public
involvement, risk communication, and a lot of other things we've been
discussing.
I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Garrick, the chair of the
advisory committee, to give us a little bit of an overview on the
committee.
DR. GARRICK: I've been thinking to myself here how I could
make a story about what we are exciting, and I am not sure I've been
successful, but one thing I think would -- maybe would be of interest to
all is to make it short.
So, I'm going to do that, because if the people from the
public want to hear more about ACNW, we'll have another opportunity
later tonight to answer questions and what have you, even though our
primary interest is to listen.
Let me just make a comment or two about what ACNW is.
Of course, we are an independent group. We are a very small
group, and when we have a full committee, there are four full-time
members. We are one short at the present time. We offset our lack of
expertise and our shortage of representation by bringing consultants in.
That's why we have Milt Levenson with us today, and he's been with us
the last couple of meetings.
Our purpose is to use our expertise and independence to,
hopefully, add credibility to NRC's decisions.
Our scope is rather extensive. It includes transportation,
storage and disposal of high- and low-level radioactive waste, as well
as reactor and nuclear material plant decommissioning activities.
However, much of our emphasis of late is focused on Yucca
Mountain. It is, as has been said many times today, a unique project, a
first of a kind, and it's a first of a kind, certainly, for the NRC and
its advisory organizations.
In addition to the business of advising the Commission, we
do provide a forum for various stakeholders to air their views.
We have been aggressive in this regard, and we encourage
everybody to use this committee as a vehicle to express their views to
the Commission, directly to the Commission, as well as to us.
We have had some evidence that we do influence changes.
We've seen changes in DOE's program that coincide with some
of our recommendations, and also, that, I think, means that, as you, the
public, influences us, we have the ability to focus on those issues and
exert whatever influence or advice that we can on having an impact on
the Yucca Mountain project.
I think that, as far as our over-arching kinds of messages
are concerned, we have been emphasizing three, primarily, in our
dealings with the NRC commissioners and the chairman.
One has to do with providing advice and whatever assistance
we can to make this transition into a risk-informed approach to
regulation.
I put emphasis on "informed" because I know there's some
anxiety with a lot of people about moving to a risk-based type of
regulatory practice. Part of the anxiety is because it's not clear what
it really is and what it really means.
I think the past chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission was quite creative and had considerable vision to come up
with the concept of risk-informed regulation. I think it's the way to
do it. It gives us a chance to address the business of how risk should
play out in the regulatory process in phases, and if the early phases
prove to have real problems, corrections can be made, and even the
possibility exists to take a new direction.
The second message that we have emphasized a great deal is
the message of understanding the safety assessments. We've been calling
it here today, probably an over-used word -- I tend to agree a little
bit with Steve on this point -- transparency.
What we're really talking about here is simply understanding
what's going on, simply being able to see a logical structure and a
somewhat understandable basis of the conclusions of the risk measures,
safety measures.
And then the third message that we've given a lot of
emphasis to -- and we've stuck our neck out on this one a little bit,
because some people would say we are not public relations experts, which
we are not, that we are not risk communicator experts, which we are not
-- and that is the issue of involving the public, but we have, as a
body, as a group, tried desperately to at least understand more clearly
how, as technical people, we can do our part in better involving the
public, better reaching out to them, and better understanding what the
issues are.
So, I think that's about all I want to say at this point and
see if we can't pick up a little time.
MR. CAMERON: All right.
I thought it might be useful to just run through some of the
notes I took where people referred to things that they might want the
advisory committee to consider, and obviously, these are just a small,
small part of what the advisory committee does, and they do have an
action plan, which I found to be very interesting in terms of what their
goals and objectives are, and that will give you an idea of the
framework that the advisory committee is working from, but let me run
through some of the things that I've heard to see if there's any
agreement, disagreement, amplification anybody wants to put on them,
anything else that we want to capture here, and excuse my scrawl, but
review of NRC staff evaluation of public comments on Part 63 was one
thing that we heard, I think, from Steve this morning. Any comments on
that?
[No response.]
MR. CAMERON: The Committee should take a broad look at
mitigating license conditions regardless of the scope of the
environmental impact statement, and my apologies to those who suggested
these for perhaps what is an awkward characterization on my part, but
Dr. Wymer, do you have something to add on that?
DR. WYMER: Yeah. In one of the earlier discussions, the
point was brought out that perhaps we ought to go beyond what's in these
documents and explore regions that aren't really covered by the
documents because they're not necessarily all-inclusive, and I think
that may be one of the important roles that this committee actually
tries to play.
We do tend to think out of the box a little bit more than
most of our -- many of our associates who have very definite assignments
and very definite roles.
We do it to the point, actually, where people sometimes
accuse us of trying to tell DOE how to do their business rather than
telling NRC how to conduct their business, but it is a role that we
play, and it's one that we are not really apologizing for even though we
sometimes are criticized for it.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you for adding that, and that's part of,
I guess, your uniqueness vis a vis some of these other organizations.
Another thing that I heard was the advisory committee should
ensure that the NRC develops a better rationale for its position on
ground water protection. Any comment on that?
Murphy? Nothing?
MR. MURPHY: I thought the NRC explained its position on
additional ground water protection requirements pretty well in the
meetings that they conducted up in Ni County, but Ni County's position
on that issue is not driven by how articulate the NRC's statement of its
position was.
It's simply driven by the fact that the citizens of New
Mexico, with the WIPP project, get an additional ground water protection
standard and, by god, the citizens of Ni County are entitled to one,
too, regardless of the scientific rationale.
That may be a good idea, but I don't know how much that's --
a better rationale is unlikely to change people's minds in that area.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you.
Make sure regulatory documents -- for example, the
environmental impact statement -- express the uncertainty involved. I
think that may go to the point that was raised by Dr. Wymer about
looking past just what's in the document to what's not in the document.
Any comments on that?
[No response.]
MR. CAMERON: Okay.
Going over to the next flip chart, there's that horrible
term "steering group" again, but I have included in that bullet the
system prioritization idea that Paul was talking about and, indeed, as
George Dials noted was Paul's brainchild, actually, as a way of have we
thought of everything and bringing in a broad public perspective and
involvement into that, and of course, we talked about the Exxon Valdez
experience, and I think Fred said that there may be a number of other
models, so to speak, that can be found in the National Research Council
book. Anybody have anything to say about that?
[No response.]
MR. CAMERON: Next thing is challenge the NRC staff to take
a hard look at the Department of Energy environmental impact statement
in terms of transportation. I mean that is a more specific point that's
put on a lot of these other more general points.
Comments?
[No response.]
MR. CAMERON: More involvement of Department of
Transportation in the process. I don't know how often the Department of
Transportation has been before the advisory committee or how
transportation has been looked at, but that's another comment.
Any further on that?
Fred?
MR. DILGER: I'd just like to expand that a little bit. I
meant really Federal agencies that might be relevant. The DOT came to
mind immediately. Another one that might be worth talking to is the
Bureau of Land Management.
A good deal of the property that the proposed rail lines and
heavy haul routes and that kind of thing are maybe built across is their
land, and some of that land they have agreements with local governments
about the use of. So, there may be benefit in the committee talking to
them.
MR. CAMERON: So, perhaps casting a wider net in terms of
issues and impacts and involvement.
More attention to tribal issues and needs. I think we heard
from Robert a number of times on various issues related to that.
Does anybody want to add anything for the advisory
committee's consideration?
There are a set of view-graphs, flip-charts in here that --
I tried to characterize the major points that people were making, but
these are what I've picked up for the advisory committee. There may be
more when you look through that.
I guess maybe it would be useful to not only go to Milt but
to just see if there's any final brief comments for the advisory
committee's benefit that anybody around the table wants to make in terms
of this first effort.
Let's hear from Milt first, and then we'll go to Mike.
MR. LEVENSON: We've tried to listen and understand concerns
and comments, but there's two things I'd like to point out.
One is the ACNW is a technical advisory committee to NRC,
and some of the concerns that we have -- because some of us have the
same concerns you have -- don't come under the jurisdiction of the NRC,
and therefore, there's very little the ACNW can do.
They can only make recommendations about issues where the
NRC has responsibility and authority, and so, if, in our letters or
reports that come out of this, you don't see a mention of something that
you raised, it doesn't mean we didn't think it was legitimate, it just
isn't in the purview of this group.
Second is an observation, because I know a lot of people in
Nevada have got a lot of history and background with the testing
station, and you have a lot of views of DOE.
Historically, NRC has not been involved in reviewing and
licensing DOE activities in the past. So, you shouldn't necessarily
apply those things of the past to this activity, which is quite
different.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks for that important
clarification, Milt.
Mike?
MR. BAUGHMAN: I would just -- I don't know how the ACNW
operates, but my guess, as one county representative, I would hope that,
at some point in the near -- or not necessarily near future, but at some
point in the future, we, as participants in this meeting today, would
get some sense of what influence these recommendations have had on how
you intend to business.
So, perhaps when you report back, you could include, you
know, some indication that your comments have influence or will
influence our deliberations, you know, in the following ways. That
would certainly give me a little greater confidence in even this
exercise.
DR. GARRICK: Yeah, I think that's an excellent comment, and
part of what I was going to talk about a little bit that would have been
somewhat of an illustration of this -- I was going to give you some
examples of where recommendations of the committee did influence the
regulatory preparation and other decisions that were made by the NRC.
MR. CAMERON: John, you might just tell people how the
advisory committee communicates with the Commission after it has its
meetings.
DR. GARRICK: Well, we do it in a number of ways.
We, of course, depending on the issue, will prepare usually
a letter addressed to the Chairman, and those letters are very
methodically developed and take a lot of energy and debate and
discussion, and we may prepare anywhere from 10 to 15 letters of that
type a year, depending on just what the issues are.
So, the letters are one important vehicle. Those letters
are responded to by the Executive Director's Office, through the
Commission, back to us, so that there is a documented feedback.
In addition to the letters, we have one-on-one meetings with
the commissioners quite frequently to better understand what's on their
mind and to have an opportunity to get input for our planning exercise,
and then we have the formal, somewhat formal public meetings with the
Commission where we go over a lot of the issues that had been previously
covered in the letters, we amplify on them, indicate the direction that
the committee seems to be going, and of course, we use the public
meetings, Commission meetings, as source material for our future
planning.
So, there's a number of mechanisms of interacting with the
Commission and the staff, and of course, our meetings, which happen
eight to 11 times a year, are quite extensive, from two to three days,
most often three days, of listening to presentations from either the
applicants or the NRC staff or outsiders as appropriate on specific
issues.
So, it's a rather positive feedback system that we have, and
we carry that even further in that we do a self-assessment, go through a
self-assessment process each year, where we kind of line up the
recommendations we've made against actions taken by the Commission and
activities of the Commission and try to measure what our impact has
been, what our progress has been, and of course, all this becomes input
for our annual planning exercise that has as its objective re-examining
our mission, our vision, the scope of our activities, and re-
establishing our priorities into first- and second-tier levels, and as
we said earlier today, the meeting we had approximately a year ago with
the public was a major influence in elevating the whole issue of risk
communication, public involvement from a -- up to a tier one priority.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you very much, John.
Let's go to Abby for a comment, final comment from her, and
then over to Robert Holden.
Abby?
MS. JOHNSON: Well, I want to compliment this committee on
taking the initiative to put this roundtable together, and I learned a
lot today, and it's not often that we get to have this sort of, believe
it or not, re-waxed exchange of views.
The message I would like to send to the committee is to take
on the Nevada public involvement challenge as a special concern of the
committee.
In Bill Reamer's remarks, that was his fourth point, involve
the public throughout. He said that NRC wants to have a relationship
for the long term and is committed to having public access to the safety
assessment information.
Well, it's pretty hard to have public access to the safety
assessment information when you're 3,000 miles away or when you're eight
hours from Las Vegas and all that kind of thing. It really is hard.
It's really a challenge. And it would be great if we had someone who
was asking those questions on a regular basis other than us and who was
thinking about that and bringing those things up and saying, well, what
are you doing about that and how's it going with Nevada and are you
getting public involvement and that kind of thing.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Abby.
Robert Holden.
MR. HOLDEN: Someone asked me earlier if I was the eternal
optimist for still coming to these meetings, but you know, maybe it's
like those machines in each town. You know, if you pull them enough
times, you might get lucky. But I don't know if that's going to happen
in this area or not, but I still have to try.
I guess the alternative is to throw up your hands, either
that or lock your borders, and some tribes have done that in the past.
I just had to have a conversation with Mr. Dials in terms
of, you know, some of the history of WIPP prior to his coming and even
while he's there and just remind him of, you know, some of the things
that happen over that period of time, and one of the things he did say
was that, yes, I realize that these things take a long time, these
agreements, these programs, emergency management take a long time to get
in place, as well as the infrastructure.
So, all I said was that I wish he would have said that in
here, but some tribes did close their borders in order to respond, to
prompt INEL, to prompt WIPP, to prompt the Federal Government on foreign
shipments to recognize their sovereignty.
There's been much talk about the economic loss that could
follow in terms of development of these types of activities, as well as
accidents.
The only thing I would say in response to that is that, you
know, the cultural loss can be put into dollars. In risk assessment,
you can't use the risk assessment models, because they don't incorporate
dose pathways. They do not incorporate the types of loss impacted from
tribal members, to tribal members.
The cultural people -- the loss in terms of -- you know, one
of the analogies that's used is pesticides. If there's pesticide, into
--
It may impact a weed grown along that river, which someone will pull and
chew, to make into a basket. It will get into their system and it will
get into the system of their children and their children's children, as
well as if that pesticide impacts that plant, it may die. That person
will not be able to make a basket. That person will not be able to give
that basket to someone in the community to do a ceremony. That person,
therefore, will not have a place, whoever sings that song and whatever
that ceremony is about.
Those are the things that we're talking about. Those are
the cultural differences that we talk about. It takes a long time to
communicate that. And I just have to remind the NRC that part of the
truster's responsibility that they bare is to do this outreach with
tribal governments. How long it takes, that's not what we think of, in
terms of time. What we look at is the long term, the long haul. And in
closing, all I say is what I said at the beginning, there's two types of
land: there's Indian country and former Indian country.
Thank you.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Robert. I think that several
members of the public are going to be joining us again tonight, when we
come back. There's one person, who has been here all day, who I just
want to give an opportunity to make a brief statement to the Committee,
and this is Ervin Lent, Nye County Supervisor, District III, over in
California, 17 miles from the proposed nuclear depository.
MR. LENT: I share a lot of the sentiment and concerns that
Mr. Holden has expressed. Being Native American myself and representing
probably 50 percent of -- well over 50 percent of the Native Americans
in Nye County, as well as a good number of non-Natives, our concern
primarily is with transputation and the assessments, as they pertain to
accidents, something that is very, very important in our minds. And
given the relationships in the past of different federal agencies toward
the top -- coming from the top down, we need to establish again that
element of trust. And I think that this meeting here today, what I hear
primarily is that you want the public to trust this activity and see
this thing come to fruition.
In the south of our county, which is fairly isolated, and
listening to the different speakers speaking about -- assuming that the
level of risk is fairly low there, I think that would be something that
we need to re -- or not only reassess, but look at even more
intricately, due to the fact that the lower county is not equipped to
address any type of accident in the area. I think that the quickest
response time in that area could be up to two hours, depending on which
area has the most prepared response team. We will need Hazmats
training. We will, also, need some type of infrastructure perhaps or
reorganization to address areas that pertain to accidents.
I think that most of all, in concert with that, is the
tribal element. We, also, have a group called the Timbashish Shoshone,
who is in the process of acquiring about 7,800 acres of land, not only
the greater portion in California, but, also, in Nevada -- I believe Nye
County and an adjacent county. Should those efforts become reality, we,
again, have those agreements between those tribes that need to be worked
out.
How this proposed repository interacts with the National
Parks Service, whether it's federal property or not -- I think that the
National Park Service, who will be not only sponsoring, but having the
reservation within the borders of the National Park Service could
perhaps offer some complications. I don't know. But, I think those are
some of the things that we really need to look at. And I speak as a
county supervisor and as a person, who represents the concerns of my
constituents.
So, I thank you today for giving me the opportunity to
comment. Thank you, very much.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thank you, very much, Supervisor Lent,
for those comments. And I'm going to turn it back over to Chairman
Garrick, to formerly adjourn the meeting. I would just thank all of you
for your participation. You really listened to each other and we had a
good discussion.
DR. GARRICK: Thanks, Chip, an outstanding job. I had to be
convinced that a facilitator was a good idea. I think I'm now
convinced.
[Laughter.]
DR. GARRICK: Well, I think we've had a long day, and I
think that we have established a very important setting and preamble for
the meeting later this evening. Obviously, everybody is invited to
return with us again. Our strategy is going to be principally to listen
and to get input and to perhaps modify these points that we've just
highlighted and be put on the spot, so to speak, as a committee, as to
whether or not we picked up our lessons well and made anything happen.
I would like to think that this will happen again. I don't
know on what frequency or what kind of a schedule, but there's no doubt
about it, in my mind, that we will be back and you will have a chance to
express yourself again and examine our performance. And that will
become very important input into our self-assessment process.
So, unless there's some burning questions on the minds of
people before we close this session, I would say that we've had a very
successful day and we are adjourned.
[Whereupon, the meeting was recessed, to reconvene at 7:00 p.m.,
this same day.]. E V E N I N G S E S S I O N
[7:00 p.m.]
DR. GARRICK: We can come to order. The Advisory Committee
on Nuclear Waste's purpose tonight is primarily to listen, as we've
doing a great deal of today, to listen to your concerns and ideas. We
aren't going to talk much about technical facts or attempt to answer
technical questions necessarily about the NRC. We have with us tonight
Mr. Bill Reamer of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Division of Waste
Management and he has agreed to answer questions and discuss issues from
the point of view of the NRC.
In addition to hearing your concerns and suggestions, we
want to have this opportunity to talk, to communicate, and, to a certain
extent, clarify the role of the Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste and
how it differs from being part of the NRC staff. And of course, one of
the important outcomes would be to get your thoughts on how we can
better fulfill our role.
We do believe that the Advisory Committee has quite a unique
role of providing independent technical oversight to the NRC Commission
and staff. And, of course, our responsibilities go beyond just
critiquing the NRC's technical program. We try to anticipate emerging
issues. We try to be proactive. We try to be a set of eyes and ears
for the Commission, looking a bit into the future. And, of course, if
you were with us today, we work very hard to try to get the technical
case supporting the safety of Yucca Mountain in as clear and real
English form as possible and do whatever we can to assist the decision-
making process.
We're not here to provide a lot of answers tonight. We are
struggling, ourselves, to examine the issues and to find answers. And
we're not here to tell you that the repository is safe. We don't know
that yet. We are attempting to be very focused on what the real risks
are. The Committee is not necessarily a group of experts on the
regulations. We do think we have some expertise with respect to the
technical issues that are involved. We think that the safety questions
are probably even more fundamental than regulations. And our hope is to
think, as much as possible, outside of the box, so to speak, and to make
a significant contribution to something that was discussed at length
today, namely this business of asking the right questions and asking a
reasonably complete set of questions.
Our perspective is to protect the health and safety of the
public; that's why we're here. We want to understand what the risks
are, as you do; what are the threats. We have learned a great deal, as
you have, about what's going on at Yucca Mountain. And we are going to
continue to be persistent and focused on our effort to give ourselves
the kind of assurance that we need to have about the safety of the
repository, so that we can communicate that to you.
We have heard a great deal about the -- because of the
complexity of the analysis supporting the safety case for the
repository, the business of communication is greatly compromised. Since
our meeting a year ago, we have been extremely sensitive to this whole
issue and asking ourselves how can we get the language in a farm that
does a better job of telling us and you just how thorough the analysis
of the mountain is and what it really seems to be saying.
So, I think that with that and with the help of Chip
Cameron, who has been chosen to help facilitate the discussion tonight,
we will kind of open it up. I will say before I do that, to my
colleagues here, if any of them have a comment to make or want to better
articulate our purpose for being here than I have been able to do so, I
welcome that.
George?
MR. HORNBERGER: Fine.
DR. GARRICK: Ray?
DR. WYMER: You've go approval.
DR. GARRICK: Milt?
[No response.]
DR. GARRICK: Okay. I guess it's your show, Chip.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you, Dr. Garrick. I think that
we're going to be relatively free form tonight. We don't have a set
agenda. As the Chairman of the Advisory Committee noted, they wanted to
-- they want to listen to your concerns, try to help you better
understand what their role is. The Committee is very interested in
finding out how the public can be more effectively involved on high-
level waste issues.
If you want to make a comment or ask a question, please
raise your hand. I'll bring you this talking stick. And if you could
just state your name and affiliation, if appropriate, for the transcript
that we're keeping here, and the transcripts will be available for
people to look at. I would just say, relax. We're going to be pretty
informal tonight and so just try to get your questions answered, get
your concerns out for the Advisory Committee, and just try to enjoy the
discussion tonight.
I'm going to start with this gentleman in the back.
MR. VASCONI: Bill Vasconi, Nevada resident. I've been here
since 1964. And I worked first as a radiological technician monitor,
then I went into construction. And I've been a construction worker ever
since '64.
First of all, I'd like to thank the Committee. I enjoyed
today. In most cases, it's the same players. How you reach the Nevada
citizens, to get more people involved, I'm hard pressed to tell you. I
will surrender the mic to any assemblymen that's here, any senator from
the State of Nevada. This is what happens at most of the meetings. So,
we come down and we tell you how we feel and try to keep it under five
minutes and go about our business.
Recent survey, Las Vegas, Nevada, asking folks what their
biggest concerns were; what are your priorities. Well, they started
with things like traffic, roadways, water, school, growth. About number
14, somebody says, well, don't you know what Yucca Mountain is. I sat
in a meeting one night and asked somebody what NTS stood for. They
said, that's easy, no to smoking.
[Laughter.]
MR. VASCONI: A lot of things have happened at the Nevada
test site.
MR. CAMERON: I like that.
MR. VASCONI: At one point in time, we had over 11,000
people working there. As far as the economy of Las Vegas, Nevada to the
construction workers -- union construction workers, a worse thing could
have happened at a better time. As you can see by the growth of this
city, they had someplace to go to work. A good many other folks, as
wages and benefits were predicated by the union men, also found work.
But the folks I think about are the rural counties. You know, they're
hard pressed. Their economy is hard pressed when Nevada test site
closed. A lot of good folks worked at the Nevada test site.
So, yeah, we're concerned with health and welfare -- I mean,
with our health and safety. We have environmental concerns. But, you
know, we, also, have an economic concern. There's a good many Nevadans
that like to maximize the benefit that could be derived from the
scientific and technological expertise that's been developed at the
Nevada test site over the last four-and-a-half decades. A good many
Nevadans, and I hope I represent some of them, feel this is a national
issue, a national problem, and we recognize it as such.
We can see commercial spent fuel rods. There's, also,
defense waste. What do we have, 114 nuclear submarines? How many
carriers do we have? We park them up and down our coast at any number
of seaports. Isn't that a national problem?
Nevada makes its livelihood -- a general livelihood off of
tourism, off of people coming to this town. Yes, there is some risk
concern with the fact that maybe some of these tourists won't like the
idea of nuclear waste being stored 100 miles away. But let's look at a
different point. Aren't we helping the nation? Aren't we taking that
nuclear waste away from water aquifers; away from populated areas?
Doesn't Nevada accept concrete, steel, produce, textiles from states
that use nuclear energy to produce it? And you can't say "foreign
made," because a German car, a Japanese car probably got nuclear energy
involved with it. Now, why should Nevada accept people's wages and
vacation monies? Why should they ask them to come to Las Vegas and
spend their money? But, they don't want to have nothing to do with
nuclear. Nuclear will never be taken out of the picture.
I hope there's no resentment to my comments. I feel that
there's a good many folks in Nevada that feel the same way I do. If
there was something wrong with nuclear, if there was something wrong
with 10,000 years -- why don't we go out to Nellis Air Force Base, the
fourth largest yard of nuclear weapons in the United States. Fourteen-
hundred-and-fifty nuclear devices at Nellis Air Force Base, 600 of them
are unclassified, atomic cruise missiles, several hundred bombs -- they
are all transported there. But the fact remains, I don't know what drip
shields are on those nuclear devices. I know they're guarded by
America's finest. They are probably 18 years old. I don't know if them
nuclear devices in Nevada at the Nellis Air Force Base are going to last
10,000 years. To me, that's a real concern, the population of one
million plus people, to have a nuclear arsenal inside our city limits.
That's not waste, gentlemen.
Now, I usually do this, if there's any questions or comments
that you want to ask me about, how about it? Otherwise, thank you for
listening to me and it's been a pleasure.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you, Bill. Maybe it would be useful to
just see if there's anybody who has a follow-up to Bill's opening
question, is how do you get more people involved interested in these
issues. I'm making an assumption that that would be useful and helpful.
I'm not sure that that assumption is correct.
But, do you have something on that, sir, that you want to
say, on that issue? All right, and please identify yourself for the
transcript and for everybody here.
MR. CHASE: How to get more people involved? How many
people in this room have read a number of DOE reports, technical
reports, okay? How many people here can understand those technical
reports from a scientific viewpoint, not a bus will drive down the
street and it will leak radioactive material? That's not the issue.
The issue is: why did it happen in the first place and what can we do
about it.
I would now like -- also, if you will permit, I would like
to make -- just add on a remark to this last gentleman who spoke. The
real problem here, I think, goes something like this: 40 years ago --
45 years ago, DOE made a judgment to bury nuclear waste and whatever
high-level nuclear waste in a geological repository. Nothing wrong with
that. Forty-five years ago, that seemed to be the best technology.
But that's 45 years ago. Hasn't the scientist or the
scientific community dreamed up any better way to bury these waste or,
perhaps, not bury them? How about not burying them and using them
instead? There are enumerable uses -- I say "enumerable;" I don't want
anybody to ask me how many is enumerable. But, at a recent meeting at
NRC, I got a couple of brochures that listed many uses. I know that
some gymnasiums in this country, they use a radiated resin for floor
polish. In every home built in Las Vegas, at least that I know of,
there are smoke detectors. All you've got to do is look inside that
smoke detector and there's a little white box in there that says,
"americium," and this is high-level nuclear waste; be careful, a
warning.
Obviously, what we're doing is burying something which can
be used and who knows what we're burying could be a real national
resource. After all, every atomic weapon in the United States' arsenal
is fired by -- or triggered, let me use that word -- triggered by a
nuclear -- high-level nuclear product that is removed from these wastes.
It's called transputation. A lot of people in this room know what at
least the word "transputation" is. I don't know the atomic
understanding of it. But, I know that it's a trigger for every single
weapon used in the United States.
It seems incredible to me that we all sit in this room now -
- you people sit in this room, trying to improve the safety of Yucca
Mountain. Can you tell me how much waste they intend to put in Yucca
Mountain? No, you can't. You know how much? Seventy-thousand tons?
How much? Twice that, right. I heard that number, 40,000 tons. Does
that mean that the radiation from there is acceptable to NRC? And don't
forget, if you take a look at the data you people are using to base your
judgments on, it's 40 years old. Can't you go back 40 years and see
what were the reasons, what were the radiation levels that caused them
to choose Yucca Mountain? It must have been zero; otherwise, they
wouldn't plant it there.
I'm a geologist and I know that in a rock nest that large,
what you can say about its consistency is -- that the only thing that
you can say about it is it's inconsistent. There are faults. There are
all kinds of different rock structures, flow rates, lord knows what
else. It's a volcano deposit and you want to have grief with it.
So, we sit here saying we're going to do this or do that.
But, nobody puts a time limit on it. I just put a 40 year time limit.
You people are talking about 10,000 years of half life. Will your level
never change in 10 years? Do you really mean -- do you really mean that
for the next 10,000 years, you're going to monitor the area around that
mountain? Now, if that's what you mean, well, okay. I don't really
think you mean that.
Also, we have to consider other things, and I really didn't
mean to get into all of this, but this gentleman raised the issue and
it's a real issue. What is all of this going to cost? Now, I've heard
numbers like by the time they seal both ends of Yucca Mountain tunnel,
we'll have $150 billion involved. Now, I heard that number. Please
don't push me against the wall.
Now, if we don't bury the waste, if we use it -- I know one
customer right now that will be more than willing to buy the electrical
power that's generated in the process, in this transputation or
accelerator process. The Nevada Power Company would be delighted to buy
it. I know of -- looking at Los Alamos, the Los Alamos site is ringed
on all sides by companies doing research in the use of atomic
transputated or atomic products, all of this derived from the thing we
call waste. And, incidentally, waste is a misnomer. It's not waste;
it's a very valuable national resource, which is being buried, because
nobody has the courage to stand up and say, hey, folks, hasn't anything
improved over the last 40 years or 45 years; can it not be done some
better way?
And one more thing: I know they're building accelerators
now in three other locations. Mr. Richardson has designated them. To
me, it's almost naive to assume that that waste or -- that waste is not
going to come to Nevada. There is no place else. To bury it on site,
they're going ot use the same estimates and same analysis techniques
they used at the mountain. It seems incredible to me that here we have
a national resource that's just -- just perfect to be used for national
defense, too, and civilian use. And I just heard the other day there's
some kind of an atomic radio nuclide. I don't know what it is. It's
being -- it's going to be used now to treat Parkinson's disease. It can
be extracted from the nuclear waste. People take an x-ray once in a
while. That's, also, done by radionuclide techniques.
There are many others; really, there are very many others.
Yet, we sit here and we talk about monitoring this waste to make
absolutely certain that its level is fine for how many years, 10,000?
There's one of those radio nuclides, incidentally, as a half life of a
million years. So, are we going to sit out there and monitor this?
Where's the money going to come from? I say this to you: what we
really need is a financial analysis of some kind, where we say how much
does -- how much will the Yucca Mountain facility cost over its lifetime
-- its expected life time. And we need another analysis: how many
products can be derived from the waste, if we don't bury it; how many
dollars does that come to? And I just mentioned two.
The third thing we have to mention and really think about --
this gentleman that was up here before really raised the issue -- if
when we seal the repository and we say, fine, can't put anymore waste in
here, this is it and that's it, folks, a lot of people are going to get
thrown out of their jobs. But, if we keep the waste on the surface, if
we don't bury it, if we use it -- and the technique for using it are
common. If you like, you can ask the Russians; they know how to do it.
There's no secrets to this. The Russians, the English, the French, ask
them. There may be modifications that we have to do here, but Los
Alamos is a wonderful lab. Why let them build an accelerator at Los
Alamos, when it's needed here? They're not going to get any waste
shipped in there.
So, what I'm trying to suggest to you is this: please take
a look at history. I know a lot of us have a great difficulty in
learning anything from history, but take a look at history and take a
look at the current situation that we're faced with here. Jobs -- look,
you've got people out there at the test site --
MR. CAMERON: Can I ask you to sort of --
MR. CHASE: Give it up? Okay. There will be many, many
jobs, if you don't bury the waste. That's all I'm saying. You're going
to replace -- you've got people, who have been trained, and I wish some
of you would -- give me just another minute. When I first saw -- they
sent me out to this double -- they said to me, we're going to send you
out to a place that's godforsaken. Take a look around and let us know
what's going on out there. This godforesaken place they sent me to was
Los Alamos. And I got out there and I tell you, what I saw would really
scare you. All the scientists were living in army tents, with the
bathroom facilities outside the tent. There was -- they were eating
army food, because that's all they had. People think they're forgotten
out there.
Of course, things got better later on. When they went to
get people to help them construct -- do the experimental work to build
the bomb, they found out nobody knew anything about this kind of atomic
thing and they found out, also, that people wouldn't believe them
anyhow. Who in his right mind would believe that a piece of particle of
matter a millions of an inch could do more damage than a 2,000 pound
bomb? Nobody. So, they had a lot of trouble and they had to do a lot
of training. Now, you've got a core of people out there, really
experienced people, know how to handle this material, know what to do
with it, can easily be trained for accelerator work. Why not take
advantage of that resource? There's lots of it out there and the jobs
will increase, if the State of Nevada pushes to build experimental
facilities to find new and better uses for what's in the material.
Thank you.
MR. CAMERON: Please state your name for the record.
MR. CHASE: Oh, Lawrence Chase.
MR. CAMERON: Lawrence Chase?
MR. CHASE: Chase, yeah.
MR. CAMERON: All right.
MR. CHASE: Incidentally, I graduated from NRC. That's
where I retired from. I just want you know.
MR. CAMERON: Thank you, very much. And I take it, going
back to your first comment about how to get more people involved, that
it would be -- and just a "yes" or a "no" on this one -- it would be
helpful if the documents -- the material was easier to understand.
MR. CHASE: Oh, yes, absolutely.
MR. CAMERON: Okay; good. Thank you.
Do we have any more suggestions on how to get more people
involved? Let's go to Mike and then we'll come back over to Grant.
MR. BAUGHMAN: I would suggest that you go to where people
are going to be impacted. This is a community of a million-and-a-half
people, 90 miles away, who have very little prospect of having waste
shipped through their area, because, in all likelihood, politics will
dictate that it go elsewhere. The NRC had a meeting up in Calyante and
I guess the answer would be come to Calyante; go to Nye County. Those
are the places where impacts would be felt. And we had a meeting in
Calyante and RC came. We had, I'd say, probably 40 citizens there.
That's about 10 percent of our population. We should have 150,000
people here tonight, if they care to the same degree that they care in
Lincoln County.
You're in the wrong place. They don't care here, because
they're not going to be impacted. And I know my colleagues from Clark
will take issue with that, but it's true. And I think the decision
makers ought to perhaps consider that.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Mike. Grant, I'm coming right
back to you. I think, Judy, do you want to comment on what Mike just
said? Go ahead.
MS. TREICHEL: Judy Treichel, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task
Force. Are you at the table going to answer questions this evening or
just listen, because I got questions?
DR. GARRICK: Well, we're primarily here to listen; but, if
you have questions, we're not going to --
MS. TREICHEL: Well, because you're trying to answer the
question how to get people involved.
DR. GARRICK: Right.
MS. TREICHEL: If there was a meeting held here and we knew
about it and it was possible to do what people wanted to do -- let's
just say I could bring in 200 people. That would be very easy. It
could be more than that. And those people came in and their question to
you was: we're here; we want to be involved; we do not want the Yucca
Mountain project to happen; what should we do first? What would anybody
tell them?
DR. GARRICK: Well, I think that our whole posture is to
gather information, get a better understanding of the issues associated
with the licensing of Yucca Mountain, because our charter is to advise
the Commission on the licensing of the mountain. So, I think that
issues beyond that are probably beyond our charter.
MS. TREICHEL: Okay. And if -- would you or anyone at NRC
be willing to tell them that if you and two-, three-, five-hundred
thousand showed up at a licensing hearing and said, this is something we
do not want licensed, that they would be successful? Is there any
channel in which they go? That's why people are not here. That's why
they donate to something like the task force, so that they believe that
they're being covered because I'm here. But, they don't see a clear way
that they can have their way. There's just no system -- process that
you follow, if you want to be able to have your way on not wanting the
project.
DR. GARRICK: Yeah. Well, I've spoken from the point of
view of the ACNW. Maybe, Bill, you'd want to speak from the point of
view of the NRC.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, Bill, and then we're going to go to
Grant.
MR. REAMER: Well, I would suggest the reason that people
show up is so that we can hear what their concerns are. Without that
information, we -- we're, obviously, not going to be responding to the
concerns that people have in their mind, if they don't express it. So,
I think one good reason for people to show up -- a good reason for
people to come is to express their concerns, so we can use that to
direct our own work and review.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Bill. I think we may come back
to put some finer points on this issue. Grant, do you want to talk
about how to get more people involved?
MR. HUDLOW: Yes.
MR. CAMERON: And please state your name, please.
MR. HUDLOW: I'm Grant Hudlow. I'm with the NREC
organization out of UNLV. Yeah, I think that Judy hit the nail on the
head, that if you want people here on this particular issue, you need to
provide a way that they can impact this decision. And you have -- the
NRC already has a way to do that, if they wanted to, and that is the NRC
is allowed to reject Yucca Mountain specifically if transputation can be
proved as a viable alternative. And DOE has really dug in their heels
on that issue, even though the National Labs, with the DOE money,
actually developed the technology and the military has it in use in
orbit around the earth right now.
So, there's no excuse that this won't work. Los Alamos has
got to study it again. Livermore studied it in the '60s; Los Alamos
studied in the energy crisis. They couldn't do it. Those people are
researchers. So, if you give somebody a project to research, what are
they going to do? They're going to research. What are they going to
recommend? Needs more research. They want the money, right. Are they
going to go out and build a plant? Are they going to go out and make a
deal with the power companies to put this technology in, to get rid of
this so called waste? Of course not. But, the NRC has the power to
tell them Yucca Mountain is off. That's the end of the story. We're
going to do transputation.
Now, if you do something like that, you'll have people
showing up, because, now, you're saying to them, okay, how can we get
this done; what are the politics; what senators can we impact; what
congressmen can we impact; and what technical transfer systems can we
set up to take the information out of the labs and put it into the power
companies.
DR. GARRICK: Yeah, well, just a comment: as far as the
activities of the ACNW are concerned, the issue of something like
transputation has not come up, because it's not on the agenda of NRC or
what have you. But, I will say this: that everybody on this Committee
wears other hats and some of those hats have involved direct involvement
in the consideration of transputation as an alternative or as a
complement.
And I don't know if you are all familiar with it, but the
National Academy of Sciences did an extensive study a few years ago on
transputation and separations techniques -- advanced separations
techniques, and the general conclusion of that was a negative one, as
far as it being economically viable. And I, also, wonder if the people,
who are advocating transputation, appreciate the ramifications of a
transputation industry, in terms of the added nuclear facilities that
would be required to implement it. If we want to support a program
where there is going to be many times more money spent than there is now
on the nuclear industry, you know, you might jump on the transputation
bandwagon, because the methods that have been advocated and proposed
require a whole infrastructure of nuclear facilities that don't now
exist. So, it's not as if this hasn't been a concept that hasn't been
examined. All of us have had an exposure to it, at one time or another,
and it's been around for 40 years, right, Milt?
So, I think, also, Ray would like to comment specifically to
Judy's comment.
DR. WYMER: Yeah, I certainly understand your position. You
should understand ours. Ours is to be objective. We can no more advise
you on how best to avoid having a repository in Yucca Mountain, as we
could advise DOE on how to have one. You know, neither direction is our
role. One of the things we can do and what we're trying to do here is
to provide mechanisms to get information out, so that you can have the
best available information to promote whatever your position is,
whatever anybody's position is. That's our legitimate role, no matter
what our personal opinions might be.
Now, I would like to say something about -- also about
transputation system. I have been involved somewhat in that over the
years, more recently just this past summer. Both the Japanese and the
French have major programs -- major national programs on partitioning
the transputation for the destruction of these elements, which are very
long lived and hazardous to your health. And about two to two-and-a-
half years, both of those countries will be coming forth with their
reports and their recommendations to their governments. These will be
very carefully -- each of them is a 10-year study. They are very
carefully planned, executed; many, many millions of dollars put in by
each country on them. It will probably be a good idea for us to await
the outcome of these two countries' investigations.
Just as a footnote to that, there is currently a resurgence
of interest in partitioning transputation in the Department of Energy,
and there was a so called road mapping effort carried out this past
summer to -- under the -- really under the instigation of Dimeniche, to
see whether or not this is a good idea and then we'll find out in the
congressional action in the fall whether or not that funding is
continued. So, those are some comments on transputation.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks Dr. Wymer. Milt?
MR. LEVENSON: Yeah. I think there's somewhat of a general
misunderstanding about transputation. The use of accelerators to get
rid of fission products by transputation may or may not be technically
and may or may not be economically feasible, but what is very clear is
that it is not a producer of energy. It is a huge consumer of energy.
And if you build big accelerators to transpute the fission products, you
probably will have to build a bunch of big nuclear power plants to
provide the electricity. It doesn't provide you electricity; it's a
consumer.
MR. CAMERON: That's an important clarification. And we're
going to go to this gentleman right here, all right.
MR. BYRAM: Yes, my name is Roy Byram. I've been in and out
of Las Vegas since World War II. Now, the last 10 years -- about 10
years ago, I've got some uranium up in California. There's three
townships up there. It's probably the largest deposit in the United
States. But, every time we get ready to open it up, the world market
collapses. The Soviet Union collapsed 10 years ago. Yellow cake went
down to four dollars a pound, about what it had been in 1938. In '73,
it was $43.50, when the cartel had it.
So, anyway, the thing I want to impress, I've been to
several -- that was a retrofit of the new plants, ore to gas. And this
-- there was actually a live nuclear device, which had been intended to
set off, cause the loss of life, and so forth. But, through a strange
set of circumstances, this didn't come about. Well, now, of course,
it's well known in government circles who did this. As a matter of
fact, the device that was intended to be used is in an old burrow pit
along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which was used for a rock quarry. And
so, when these people had to ditch it there, they conveniently found the
site with public nuisance and kids were swimming and occasionally one of
them would drown. So, they just filled it in. Well, you can go out
there and check your radiation. The thing is still sitting there
ticking away.
So, I think what you have to do is point out the dirty air
lobby and their financial plots. Now, in the State of Nevada, the
politicians are all pimps for the dirty air lobby. They get most of
their funding from that. They put out all this bad talk. And when
you're dealing with a bully, you've got to stand up to him and you've
got to -- you've got to kick him in the scrotum. That's to get their
attention. And this is what the pro-nuclear people don't do. They just
sweet talk. I mean, you've got to go after these people.
Now, the oil people, the builder burgers run the world.
They put one of their own kind in the White House, because he was -- he
had the reputation of being -- controlling the vote, which he certainly
exploited to great advantage. Well, whether he's actually guilty of the
various things they accuse him of, I doubt it. I think he's probably a
pedophile. But, anyway, that's my own feeling.
MR. CAMERON: May I ask you to sort of wrap it up?
MR. BYRAM: Okay. Well, I'm just --
MR. CAMERON: I don't think this has ever been brought to
the table.
[Laughter.]
MR. BYRAM: Okay. But, anyway, I'm just telling you, you
fellows here, you're going to sweet talk yourself out of business.
You've got to go after the bad guys and be just as bad as they are.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you, Roy. Roy, what was your
last name?
MR. BYRAM: Byram, B-y-r-a-m.
MR. CAMERON: B-y-r-a-m, Roy Byram. Okay, thank you, Roy.
DR. GARRICK: We won't forget that.
[Laughter.]
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Sally -- Sally Devlin?
MS. DEVLIN: I'm Sally Devlin and I'm from Parwaukee, Nye
County, Nevada and I have been attending these meetings for well over --
going on my seventh year. And I got into this, because all of the
transport was to go through Parwaukee to Yucca Mountain. And I said,
"over my dead body." And I went back to school and I have continued on.
One of my suggestions in how to get more people here is have
somebody important come here.
[Laughter.]
MS. DEVLIN: Now, I'm sorry, but I have no idea -- Mr.
Richardson is the head of it. I never met him.
MR. CAMERON: I didn't think anybody was going to be able to
follow Roy.
[Laughter.]
MS. DEVLIN: Well, I'm sorry, I do not know who on the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission is going to be the five people who is
going to say "yes" or "no" to Yucca Mountain. And I certainly would
like to meet them personally and either hit them over the head or shake
their hand. And I think this is terribly important.
Nye County is -- I don't know who does the scheduling for
the meeting, but we've had one NWTR meeting since '97 and we've had one
DOE meeting and that's it. All the other meetings have been in
Amargossa and Beatty and I thoroughly object to it. So, whoever does
the scheduling should find out where the people are. We have 35,000
soon to be 60 people in Parwaukee. There are 1,400 or less in Amargossa
and they have 1,000 in Beatty. Who do you want to talk with? The
people that are affected. There's nobody at Lathrop Wells, at this
time. So, I'm sorry, they're not many there. But, we have to have a
little humor.
But, I did -- I did want to bring something up and that is,
I really came here, because I feel so strongly about the environmental
impact statement of the DOE, that it is among the poorest I have ever
read, and I've read dozens of them. And I feel that your group should
make the DOE, and this is my contribution to this evening, responsible,
not only fiscally, but morally to the public and ethically to the
public.
And my title is naked and I'm going to expose the DOE, who
is running around naked. And the Department of Energy, who owns the
mythical kingdom of Yucca Mountain, might want to excavate not one, but
two repositories. They haven't a clue for a design. And if anybody can
show me in 1,600 pages where they've designed one repository, much less
two repositories, I'll eat the paper. They haven't a clue for the
design of the storage of 70,000 to 140,000 metric tons of high-level
radioactive waste. And in that report, for years, everything was called
metric tons HLW. In this report, they very covenly changed it to metric
tons heavy metal. Now, that's fraud on the public. This stuff is
radioactive and I want to see that "R" in there. That's another thing.
This is fraud on the public.
Now, the other problem is defense waste. Ten percent or 20
percent in the one or two repositories will be defense waste and that is
classified. And as far as I am concerned, you cannot put classified
waste in my mountain.
The next thing that they haven't done is the canisterization
for this high-level waste. And I have been to dozens of meetings on
this subject. They want 10-11,000 or 20-22,000. It will cost, from the
last I heard, 350,000 a piece to 500,000 a piece. That, to me, is $100
billion. And I'm sorry, it is unacceptable, because these canisters are
imaginary and unsafe. We've had explosions in Michigan and Wisconsin,
just the same as in Japan. And what is worse about the canisterization
is they have not, for one minute, in this 1,600 pages, discussed my
bugs, and I'm talking about my cropic invasion. And my bugs love the
nickel. They love the steel. They love all these wonderful metals and
they will poison the water faster than anything in the world. So that
my cropic invasion, the colloidal movement of water, is not even
considered in these 1,600 pages and it should be.
The other thing that is most important is transputation, and
we are talking about digging an imaginary mountain and having imaginary
canisters to be transported by imaginary DOT, who have never been to our
meetings, who have held two meetings in the last six years in Las Vegas
and never been seen since. And what is worst about the DOT is they are
not indemnified from liability, as is DOE. And for those of you who
don't know what indemnification from liability is, it means that years
ago, there was no insurance, in case there was an accident. And it
started, I think, with five, ten million. Now, it's up to 550 million.
If there is a DOE nuclear accident, a place is indemnified for that
amount per accident, period. This is the -- whatever it is; I forget --
what is it -- Rice Anderson Act. And this is absolutely unacceptable,
because you blow up Chicago, 550 million. We build half a casino here
in Vegas for that amount.
[Laughter.]
MS. DEVLIN: So, this is what we're talking about, is that
it is criminal. And if you're going to kill us, I want to be paid for
it.
[Laughter.]
MS. DEVLIN: Now, what is DOT's accident record? When I
gave testimony, their accident record since '87 to '96, with the
chemical industry, at the plants on delivery, they had 250,000
accidents, '87 to '96. On the roads, they had 260,000 -- you may quote
my GAL report -- and no indemnification. Now, we're talking about
indemnification from the hauling companies. Come on, what are they
hauling? A mythical canister to an unbelievable, unreal repository.
It is really a shame, and I say that because of all the
other things I'm involved with, our growing scientific engineering
industries have developed the technology to make the waste vanish and
these companies will make fortunes. The last I heard, a gram of
plutonium was selling for 20,000. I think that is a nice hunk of
change. And these reusable commodities and billions of taxpayer's money
will be saved. I wonder if you government people have ever heard of
saving taxpayer's money, of encouraging entrepreneurs to go into new
things. Years ago, my family had a horse and, boom, the cars came
along. They bought the cars. This is what we've got as an analogy for
Yucca Mountain. We don't need it.
The final thing is the emperor has spending billions of
dollars running around naked in invisible clothes. If this project
continues in perpetuity, it might turn the residents of Nye and Clark
County, Nevada into two-headed mutants, who feed on fuel pellets, if you
remember my analogy on this. It is unacceptable to dump all of the
nation's nuclear waste in our leaking mountain, with no comprehensive
plans or projected costs. The environmental impact statement is a
mythological vacuous waste of money and paper. And I heard it cost over
20 million to produce. That's absolutely unacceptable.
Yucca Mountain, to begin with, is no analog and that is the
concept for it. We should not bury high-level nuclear waste and I am
appealing to the ACNW to write off one of its inimicable recommendations
that the NRC reject this project. And remember, I am leaving you with
assumed uncertainty.
DR. GARRICK: I have to say that we have come along way.
The last time you spoke a year ago, we were gods.
And now, it's a masterful putdown.
MS. DEVLIN: No coffee, that's why.
[Laughter.]
MR. CAMERON: We -- the chairman of the Commission did come
out and talk to people last March or April, I guess. But, I just wanted
to just go back to Sally's recommendation, which has been suggested in
other times, is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, itself, actually
come out to Nevada and have one of their Commission meetings out here.
So, I'll just put that on there.
And I want to ask Abby if she would just repeat -- you made
a point this afternoon about the NRC having more of a presence here and
you were telling the Advisory Committee about that; but, I think, in the
past, you have amplified on that particular idea and I thought it might
be useful for the Committee to hear that.
MS. JOHNSON: Well, I'm so glad you called on me, Chip. I'm
Abby Johnson with Eureka County, Nevada, and I will amplify on that and
then I have a comment. I think this came up at the NRC meeting in June,
regarding the rule, when Bill Reamer mentioned his desire to have a
long-term relationship with Nevada or something like that, but not to
locate a functional office in Nevada. And one way to have a long-term
relationship is to both live in the same place. I've done this and it
really does work much better than the long distance relationship.
And so, my comment in that area is that in order to have
meaningful and public involvement with the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needs to be in the place
where the project is. Now, I know there's a couple of folks, who are
here, who go out and look over DOE shoulder. But, those aren't the
people that are interacting with the public; those aren't the people
that are communicating with the public; those aren't the people, who are
prepared to represent the Commission in Nevada. And I think that's what
Chip was referring to, is that there needs to be -- as long as we're
going in this direction, there needs to be -- you can't have the long-
term involvement, if you don't have the actual presence of long-term
involvement and the commitment, which isn't just words, but it's deeds,
as well.
The comment I want to make goes back to part of the
discussion we were having this afternoon, and for those that weren't
here, I'll sort of try to frame it. It was called, "did we forget
something." And it was about when the Department of Energy is putting
together their plan for how they're going to keep this waste allegedly
contained and thinking about did we remember everything, is there
something that we've forgotten -- kind of like when you're packing for
the family vacation and you want to make sure that everybody has their
toothbrush and their sandals and their bathing suits. And what we were
assuming in that discussion is that everybody wants to discover that we
forgot our toothbrush. And the comment that I have, and this is not a
comment to reflect poorly on individual employees of DOE or the NRC, but
if we have a project where the mission of the Department of Energy is to
open Yucca Mountain, that getting to yes thing that I talked about this
morning, then it's really not in the interest of Department of Energy
employees and their contractors and subcontractors, blah, blah, blah, to
discover, oh, oh, we're missing the toothbrush. It's better just to
keep going and keep getting to yes and not discover flaws or even
possibly fatal flaws in the project.
Now, that's DOE. But, I have a similar concern about NRC.
In order to understand the project, NRC and DOE have to work closely
together. And there becomes a sort of sense of camaraderie and
collegiality and all those things when you work closely with other
people, in order to work on frankly a common goal of getting DOE
licensed. I heard Bill Reamer today say that NRC will be the
independent regulator, will take an independent look. But, at the same
time, I'm concerned that that same sort of philosophy might be
applicable in the NRC and that it's not in anybody's interest to find
stuff wrong. It's in everybody's interest to make sure we don't find
anything wrong, so that we can get this project -- get this project on.
And that is my concern, because I feel that already, there are a number
of flaws; that if we were looking for flaws in the project, the project
would have already been stopped. But, because we're not looking for
flaws in the project, we're only -- we only want to hear good news. And
because we only want to hear good news, we frame everything in terms of
the good news.
MR. CAMERON: Thanks, Abby. I think it might be appropriate
to let Bill Reamer say something about this issue of closeness between
the regulator and the potential licensee and to ask others in the
audience. Bill, can sincerely say any number of times about how the NRC
is going to be independent. Are there certain actions that can be taken
to give the public more assurance that the NRC will be independent?
MR. REAMER: Well, I think the NRC is independent and we
need to appear to be independent, as well, and so our relationship has
to be consistent with that and it has to appear to be consistent with
that. And that means we have to conduct ourselves that way.
The other point that is made, that we're not interested in
finding flaws, I would disagree with that. I think the only way that I
can perform my job is if I check and recheck and find everything. And
this is, also, the attitude that I would hope that DOE has and I hear
DOE say that they will check and recheck and look for flaws. And this
is -- I think this accounts for the success that we've seen with the
nuclear reactor program, that they are interested in looking and finding
the flaws and correcting them, because they understand that's the way
they achieve the public protection, the excellence that we all want.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, thanks, Bill.
MS. DEVLIN: What is this link between NRC and the 15 and
25 -- and the --
MR. CAMERON: EPA?
MS. DEVLIN: -- EPA? That's always in the press. And I
think the public would be most interested in this. Is NRC trying to get
rid of the EPA? This is terribly confusing.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Let's try to -- I guess you revealed
our dirty secret about getting rid of the EPA. But, let's see if we can
clarify that. I just was wondering, anybody else want to address,
before we go to clarification about the relationship between the EPA and
NRC, this issue of the independence -- the perceived and real
independence of the NRC? Okay, Grant?
MR. HUDLOW: I think this goes back, also, to how do you get
more people here. And Congress has been concerned enough about not only
the DOE, but all of the bureaucracy, that they passed the Results Act
some time ago and the GAO, now, is writing up each organization, how
they're doing on the Results Act. And, of course, the entire -- the DOE
is probably coming from secrecy, probably has more problems than the
other civilian type of bureaucracy. But, the problem is that where
you're used to doing things in a cultural way -- bureaucratic culture
forms and then you come along with a Results Act.
We talked about that quite a bit this morning. Lynn started
off right away that we're trying to learn how to be leaders, in a word.
And it's the same thing with the NRC perception of independence. They
can say that they're independent from now until dooms day and that's not
what gets people to believe them. What gets people to believe them is
they ask people what do you think the problems are, how can we solve the
problems, and get the input, which is back to how do you get people here
that want to do that. You need to ask for that.
In industry the way we do that, people -- you know, they're
used to the boss telling them what to do. And so when they ask them
what do you think, they're thinking, there's running through their mind,
well, let's see how much trouble is that going to get me into, if I open
my big mouth, right. So, we have to do something to encourage them.
And what we did in electronics was we guaranteed them that we would run
a test based on whatever their ideas were. And so that put the
engineers to work, because people say things that are not in
engineeringese or bureaucratese or whatever and somebody has got to
translate it into a test. And that gives you, then, the interest level
that people will buy into it.
You get -- one of the problems in the government bureaucracy
is when you do this procedure, you get a productivity increase of a
factor of four. In industry, that's big money. In the government, who
cares. My paycheck comes anyway. My boss is going to do whatever he
does. My subordinates are going to do whatever they do. There's no
incentive for them to get that efficient. But, it's more than the
efficiency. There is an incentive for them to get the PR straightened
out and you're suffering from a PR problem right now. And that's very
easily solved with those procedures.
MR. CAMERON: We've heard strains of this actions speaks
louder than words, show us how the NRC has changed something by what the
public has said. I don't know, perhaps food for thought for the NRC
perhaps is do people -- does the public really know about all of the
actions that we take vis-a-vis DOE in this pre-licensing stage, where we
request that they change something or do something. In other words, is
that documented for the public? I don't know. Milt, if you have any --
if you want to comment on anything like that. But, it doesn't seem like
people have an awareness of what the real relationship might be. Milt,
do you want to make a comment?
MR. LEVENSON: Just one comment about this business of the
regulator and the regulatees. I spent seven years working for the
electric utility industry and, at one point, I was president of the
American Nuclear Society. I suspect I know a couple of thousand people
that work in licensed nuclear power plants. And I don't know anybody
that considers anybody from the NRC a comrade or a buddy or anything but
a pain in the but.
And so that isn't -- you have to look at what's actually
happened. And we've got a history, not just one group, but there's a
hundred licensed nuclear power plants in this country and a couple of
hundred facilities, hospitals, all licensed. And everybody here will
know somebody that works in some of these places and you can just check
on what is that relationship.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Milt. Let's go to Judy.
MS. TREICHEL: We don't necessarily see it on that level.
And if you -- one of the few exposures I have to NRC is to get the
weeklies, where I chose letters that have been written and minutes from
meetings that have been held and so forth. And I've heard several times
the chair saying that they did not want to be a burden on the licensee.
This has come up several times with petitions that have gone to them
about taking extra precautions for Y2K, possibly trying to shut down
some plants that may be bad actors or aren't quite compliant yet with a
lot of things. And I think the only -- we've never had, in this state,
a licensee, so we don't know that, and DOE is not even an applicant yet.
So, we haven't seen that sort of thing.
What we have seen is stories that have been written about a
problem on the Colorado River, where there is a uranium mine with a
tailings pile. And it's right near the river and the owner wants to cap
it over, because it's much cheaper than moving it away from the water.
And NRC said, that's fine. They checked off the boxes, it's just fine,
and people have said, no, no, that's not the way to go. And NRC seemed
absolutely helpless to do anything about that, because it appeared that
all of the boxes had been checked off, whether it was ultimately the
real solution to the problem or not.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Judy. That issue of perception
that may -- that may not be correct, but it is a perception out here.
Mary?
MS. MANNING: Any time you tell the public that you're a
regulatory agency, their eyes are going to glaze over. From a real --
from being in the public -- for representing the public, as I do at
these things, I -- the public would like to know if the Commission has a
bottom line. If Department of Energy submits a license application, if
it goes through hearings, if the NRC finds a fatal flaw, any flaw --
let's take the issue of groundwater travel time. Let's say the NRC
scientists come up with a much faster travel time than the DOE does.
Will that be enough to stop the repository? Because, if you're going to
play your independent role as a reviewer and as a regulator, the public
needs to know if you have a bottom line, and that's not clear at all.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Mary. And the question is:
how do you demonstrate that before you get to the bottom line. Do we
have some comments from people, who have not spoken yet tonight on any
of these issues or anything that they would like the Advisory Committee
to hear about? John?
DR. GARRICK: I just want to -- I will probably ramble a bit
about what Mary just said. I won't speak for the NRC, but I will speak
for the ACNW. We do have a bottom line. We will honor the law, the
standard, whatever that may be. But, in the meantime, the Committee has
been very persistent and deliberate in trying to deal with what we
sometimes call the "so what question," the "so what question" being what
does this really got to do with safety. We hear a tremendous amount of
presentations and discussion and we often -- and we're always searching
for what the connection is between what we're hearing and the
performance capability of the repository. So, I think from a technical
standpoint, there's no doubt about having a bottom line and there's no
doubt that if we see something that's fundamentally in error or
questionable, we don't hesitate to express that and advise the
Commission accordingly.
So, I don't quite understand this notion that we're not (a)
flaw searching and (b) calling it to the appropriate people's attention.
Because, if we're not doing that, then, of course, we're not doing our
job. And I think that the advisory committees are pretty well
established in their ability to burrow in on issues that are safety
related. And I think that as Milt Levenson spoke in terms of a
licensee, that there's a great deal of evidence among licensees that,
indeed, that job is being done.
I think that what we're dealing with here, and Judy said it
very well, is a project that's a unique project for which there's no
real precedence of licensing. And we're all, therefore, learning as we
go along. We even -- we had to learn how to do the safety case. In
fact, we're still learning how to do it. And secondly, the State of
Nevada has no experience with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And
that is a handicap that somehow has to be overcome. And we're hoping
that this kind of a meeting is making a contribution to that.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, John. We're going to go to
Bill Reamer now. But, John's comments would prompt me to ask whether
anybody would want to offer an opinion. Is this independent role of the
Advisory Committee separate from the NRC appreciated by people?
Because, we keep sort of lumping them all together and there is a
different relationship there. I don't know if anybody wants to comment
on that at all, but let's go to Bill Reamer.
MR. REAMER: We do have a bottom line. It's compliance with
our regulations. It's compliance with our proposed Part 63, when that
rule is made final, which should be sometime in the first quarter of
next year. And it's DOE's burden to provide a licence application and
defend a licence application and prove that they meet our regulations,
comply with our regulations. And it's our obligation to review that
closely, to weigh all the information and reach impartial and objective
conclusions. And we will do that. And this is the way we regulate
broadly within the industry and this is the way we will regulate this
project here.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Bill. Is there anybody that we
haven't heard from yet that wants to say something to the Advisory
Committee while they are out here in this public meeting?
[No response.]
MR. CAMERON: Okay. There was a question about the
relationship between EPA and NRC, in terms of the standard, that
apparently seems to be still a matter of confusion. Bill, can I go to
Captain Clark for just sort of a brief explanation of the relationship
between the two agencies? And where is Sally? Okay, we'll wait on
that, because I think she needs to hear it.
Anybody else back here that would like to make a comment?
[No response.]
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Well, I think we're getting near the
end of our string. I don't know where Abe had to go to find Sally, but
--
[Laughter.]
MR. CAMERON: -- I guess I'll just try to fill the time up
here. Does the Committee, Dr. Garrick, want to offer anything at all?
DR. GARRICK: Well, I think that we've -- it's been said
many times that the fundamental driver of the nuclear safety community
has been the radiation dose. It's always thought that way. And, of
course, there is a dose response curve that converts a dose to health
effects. And as we heard this morning, there continues to be some
controversy about that, particularly with respect to low-level
radiation. But, I think that this Committee is pretty much on record
supporting the conclusion that all pathways 25 MR standard is -- does,
in fact, achieve the goal of protecting the health and safety of the
public. So, I don't -- you know, it's not -- for us, it's not a
complicated issue.
As to what the underlying debate is between the NRC and the
EPA, I'll let the NRC address that. We all know, of course, that what
it really has to do with is the groundwater standard and that
implementing and allocating radiation -- allowed radiation dose to the
groundwater standard makes that, in fact, the standard. And that is in
the judgment of most experts in health physics and is way below what is
necessary to achieve the goal of protecting the health and safety of the
public. So, I don't think it's much more complicated than that.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, Dr. Garrick. Ray Clark from
the EPA, if we can get you to perhaps just tell us what the relationship
is between NRC and DOE, in terms of setting standards; secondly, why the
EPA believes that 25 millirem is a better standard than 15 millirem; and
thirdly, what your viewpoint is of what Dr. Garrick said, that with a
separate groundwater standard, that does, indeed, becomes the standard
and the 25 versus 15 millirem is basically moot, if I understood Dr.
Garrick correctly. So, there are three questions for you.
MR. CLARK: You're going to have to walk me back through the
three questions, I'm afraid.
[Laughter.]
MR. CLARK: We'll do it one at a time.
MR. CAMERON: Okay; good.
MR. CLARK: Well, as far as the four millirem being the
standard, I think Abe said it probably better than I could today and
with more authority, that we have a number of options for compliance
points and a number of scenarios and it just depends on the conditions
that exist in the final standard, as to which is the controlling factor.
So, to just say that -- well, I don't know if that's what Dr. Garrick
was saying, but if just to say that four is lower than 25, that may not
be the case.
What is our second --
MR. CAMERON: The second ball, I guess, what the basic
relationship is between -- I think some people sound like for one, they
don't understand why does the -- why does the NRC have standard setting
authority; why does the EPA have standard setting authority. And I
guess the last question would be: why does the EPA think that 15
millirem is better than 25 millirem?
MR. CLARK: Well, the EPA, clearly, has standard setting
authority through the Energy Policy Act of 1992 and it's incumbent upon
the Commission to be consistent with those standards. So, there's -- is
that the relationship you're looking for? No.
MS. DEVLIN: It's involved here. What I take, everybody
seems to be their own -- there is no communication. You can set one
standard, they can set one standard, and you have to meet in the middle.
MR. CAMERON: So, I think you need to put a finer -- we're
going to go to Bill Reamer to talk a little bit about the relationship.
Could you talk about the 25 versus 15? Or, perhaps, we'll go to Mal
Murphy on that. Go ahead.
MR. CLARK: All right. As far as 15 versus 25, I -- I mean,
the Commission is entitled to their opinion as to what the standard
should be, just as anybody else is. We arrived at 15 after taking into
consideration the NES recommendation as to the risk level. And it's a
fine point, but based on our factors, 15 is within that range; 25 is
slightly above it. Fifteen is, also, consistent with the generic
standards that we have out. Those are standards under which WIPP was
approved. Well, that's the only one that's been approved so far under
the standards. But, that's -- it is consistent with that.
The risk level involved at 15 is roughly within the risk
limits allowed in other EPA programs. I'm sure the Commission would
argue with this to some extent, but 15 is, also, consistent with a
number of international or at least other foreign country standards.
Well, basically, that's the reason we arrived at 15.
MR. CAMERON: Ray, before we go to Mal Murphy, can you just
let the people who weren't with us this afternoon, can you tell them
when the public meetings are going to be on the proposed EPA standard
this year?
MR. CLARK: Sure. It's not a public meeting. It's
technically a public hearing. But, the -- well, out here will be next
week -- I don't remember the dates -- the 19th -- yeah, the 19th,
Amargossa Valley in the community center, starting at noon.
MR. CAMERON: Let me put these -- let me just put these up
here for people, so there's no confusion: October 19th at the Amargossa
Valley community center, AV community center, noon until what time, Ray?
MR. CLARK: That was left undefined. As long as there is
interest, we will stay there that evening.
MR. CAMERON: It starts at noon. And we will go to Mal. Is
there another public hearing here?
MR. CLARK: On the 20th and 21st, it's here in Las Vegas. I
forget the exact name of the facility. It's 101 Convention Center
Drive. It's Las Vegas Conference and Convention Services or something
to that effect, Room 111.
MR. CAMERON: Okay, 101 Convention Center Drive, Room 111,
and --
MR. CLARK: Noon till 9:00 p.m., the first day, 20th.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. If anybody wants a clarification on
that, please see Ray. And let me go to Mal Murphy. He may be able to
help us out. But, you go ahead, you have something more to say?
MR. CLARK: You think Mal can -- no, never mind. Just one
more quick comment and I don't know if that's important or not, at this
point: I've heard several times today that this effort to license Yucca
Mountain is a first of its kind effort. Clearly, WIPP, which is a
geological repository, has been through not the same process granted,
but it is a repository that has been approved. It's not the same waste,
it's not the same medium, but it is a repository and has been through
the process. I just want to throw that out.
The first day in Las Vegas, noon to 9:00 p.m; second day in
Las Vegas, 9:00 a.m. to noon.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thank you. Noon to 9:00 p.m.; 9:00
a.m. to noon the second day. Let's go to Mal Murphy from Nye County on
the EPA standard.
MR. MURPHY: Yeah, let me just -- on the Amargossa Valley
hearing, before I get into the standard, the -- you will recall, I'm
sure, Ray, that the EPA committed to us, in a phone call last week, that
there will be at least the brief evening session at the Amargossa Valley
community center, because the Nye County Board of County Commissioners
will be meeting, I think, essentially all day that day on the 19th. And
so commissioners and those in attendance at the Commission meeting
wouldn't be able to attend a meeting at the Amargossa Valley community
center until that evening. So, it will go from noon until no one else
wants to speak during the afternoon, I guess. But, then for at least
some brief period in the evening, starting at I don't know what time,
but there will be an evening session.
But, just a couple of points: first of all -- well, let me
identify myself. I'm Mal Murphy and I'm the regulatory and licensing
adviser to the Nye County nuclear waste repository project office. The
Nye County position on the EPA standards is currently undergoing
internal county review. And so, I don't -- I can't speak for the county
this evening on what our position is with respect to EPA's proposed
standards. But, you know, we will be stating that position formerly
next week.
But, just a couple of points on the additional groundwater
protection standards versus the 15 millirems, for example. The 15
millirem, as we understand it, is an all pathways, all radionuclide
standard, whereas the maximum contaminant levels in the additional
groundwater protection do not apply to all radionuclides. They apply
only to selected radionuclides. So, there is that difference.
As far as the relationship goes between the EPA and the NRC,
unfortunately -- I think both agencies would agree unfortunately, over
the years, Congress has, from time to time, given both the NRC and the
EPA overlapping -- somewhat overlapping authority in these areas, most
recently, I guess, in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and the Energy Policy
Act of 1992. And so, both agencies have a legitimate statutory role to
play in formulating whatever they think is necessary in the area of
radiation protection out at Yucca Mountain.
With the EPA, under the law, getting the last pitch, if you
will, so that once the EPA standards are in place, then whatever the NRC
does has to conform to or be consistent with -- I can't remember the
exact language; Bill Reamer does, I'm sure -- but the NRC has to follow
the lead of the EPA. But, the NRC has its own independent statutory
authority, as does the EPA, and that, from time to time over the years,
has generated some conflict and jealousy between the agencies. But, we
think the EPA is leading the way in this and we're confident that the
NRC will eventually, as they're required to, conform their standards to
whatever the EPA finally adopts.
MR. CAMERON: Bill, do you want to just make sure that
people understand Mal's last point, that there will not be two
conflicting standards -- and then we'll come back over to Judy -- that
eventually there's just going to be one standard, so there's no
confusion on this?
MR. REAMER: Yeah. I can confirm what Mal described. And
I'm not clear whether this responds to Sally's question, but the law,
the Energy Policy Act of 1992, gives EPA authority to set a dose
standard for Yucca Mountain. That will be the only standard -- the law
says that will be the only standard that applies to Yucca Mountain. And
it, also, says that one year after EPA issues that standard in final
form, which we heard today would be approximately August of 2000, that
the NRC must modify its requirements to be consistent with that
standard.
MR. CAMERON: Okay. Thanks, bill, and I would thank Ray and
Mal and Bill for trying to clarify that for us. Let's go to Judy.
MS. TREICHEL: This may be a good way to come to a
conclusion. I think I finally have something you can do. I know you
can't dump the dump. You can't get into transputation. One of the
things that definitely needs to be recommended is for those of us here
in Nevada, who try and do it all -- when it comes to this program, DOE
has thousands of employees with all kinds of departments and, obviously,
so does the NRC, because we're winding up now where we have hearings
from two agencies and proposed guidelines, proposed rules, proposed
standards. We've got meeting dates with one agency, which is the NRC,
falling on top of each other. And tomorrow is an excellent example,
where the LSN people are meeting a couple of blocks away, you're back
here meeting, and we're flying back and forth between the two, to catch
the sessions that we believe we need to see, that are the most
important.
And this isn't the first time. But, it seems to me that
with the sort of money and numbers of people and whatever, there could
be a calendar person that would be able to do this, because we've, for
many years, had problems with meetings falling on top of each other; not
always in the same town, but coinciding.
MR. CAMERON: you're right, Judy, we ought to be able to
handle that.
MS. TREICHEL: Then hit the hammer.
[Laughter.]
MR. CAMERON: All right. Thank you, very much. LSN is
licensing Support Network.
I don't see anybody else that we haven't heard from tonight.
And, John, I would leave it to your discretion, as the chairman, about
how much longer you want to go on.
DR. GARRICK: Well, I'm hungry.
[Laughter.]
DR. GARRICK: It's been a long day and I'm certainly
satisfied that everybody has had an opportunity to express themselves.
And I think we have a great deal of information. I think we've
summarized some points along the way. This, together with what we did
this morning, gives us a lot to work with. We do intend to write a
letter to the Commission about this day's events. And I suspect you
will see appearing in that letter a lot of the things that Chip has
noted on the chalkboard.
MR. CAMERON: Okay.
DR. GARRICK: So, unless we want to review those, Chip, I'm
ready to adjourn.
[Whereupon, at 8:45 p.m., the meeting was concluded.]

Page Last Reviewed/Updated Friday, September 29, 2017