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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
***
BRIEFING BY NUCLEAR WASTE
TECHNICAL REVIEW BOARD
***
PUBLIC MEETING
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
One White Flint North
Rockville, Maryland
Tuesday, July 30, 1996
The Commission met in open session, pursuant to
notice, at 10:00 a.m., Shirley A. Jackson, Chairman,
presiding.
COMMISSIONERS PRESENT:
SHIRLEY A. JACKSON, Chairman of the Commission
KENNETH C. ROGERS, Member of the Commission
GRETA J. DICUS, Member of the Commission
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STAFF AND PRESENTERS SEATED AT THE COMMISSION TABLE:
JOHN C. HOYLE, Secretary
KAREN D. CYR, General Counsel
JOHN E. CANTLON, U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical
Review Board
JARED L. COHON, U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical
Review Board
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P R O C E E D I N G S
[10:00 a.m.]
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Good morning, ladies and
gentlemen.
This morning, the Commission is pleased to welcome
John Cantlon and Jared Cohon from the U.S. Nuclear Waste
Technical Review Board, who will brief the Commission on the
status of their activities.
Dr. Cantlon, Dr. Cohon, we are very pleased to
have you here.
It has been more than two years, since March of
1994, since the Technical Review Board last briefed the
Commission about the Board's activities and recommendations
and its perspectives on the Department of Energy's program
to manage high-level radioactive waste. Much has changed in
that period, some of which I won't mention, but in fact the
makeup of the Commission itself is quite different in that
this will be the first briefing that Commissioner Dicus and
I have had with the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.
We both have been looking forward to this briefing.
Since the last briefing, the National Academy of
Sciences, as you know, as directed by the Energy Policy Act
of 1992, has issued its report that provides advice to the
Environmental Protection Agency for establishing standards
for the disposal of high-level waste in a geologic
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repository. Based on the National Academy's study, the EPA
is now developing standards for Yucca Mountain and the NRC
would amend its regulations as appropriate to the revised
standards.
Changes have also occurred in the DOE program.
The tunneling program at Yucca Mountain has progressed
nearly four miles into the mountain, allowing a more
detailed assessment of specific site issues. The DOE has
issued a viability assessment for determining the technical
suitability of the Yucca Mountain site and, as you are all
aware, Congress is currently considering legislation that
could significantly alter the existing high-level
radioactive waste program. So it is clear then that the
high-level radioactive waste program has been and continues
to be in a state of change, so the Commission believes that
this briefing is very timely in that sense and is
particularly interested in receiving your views and the
views of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board on the
state of DOE's civilian radioactive waste management
program.
Commissioner Rogers, do you have anything you
would like to add?
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: No.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner Dicus?
COMMISSIONER DICUS: No.
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CHAIRMAN JACKSON: If not, we look forward to
hearing from the two of you.
DR. CANTLON: Chairman Jackson, Commissioners,
ladies and gentlemen, good morning. It is a pleasure for us
to be here today.
Just by way of background, my background is in
environmental biology and Jerry Cohon is the dean of the
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale
University.
Since we have not met with you before, let me just
begin briefly by summarizing what the Nuclear Waste
Technical Review Board does. It is charged, as you know,
with evaluating the technical and scientific aspects of the
Department of Energy's high-level nuclear waste management
program. This includes site characterization and transport
of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
Today, in our prepared remarks, we would like to
briefly review some of the key developments of 1995 and the
first half of 1996. These have been somewhat turbulent
times, as you referred to, but there also has been
substantial progress. I would like especially to offer our
thoughts on some of the legislative and regulatory changes
that were proposed during '95 and which still are under
consideration.
Then we will summarize for you the Board's current
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views on the status of the program, including DOE's plans
for evaluating the viability of Yucca Mountain site within
the next two years. After our prepared remarks, we look
forward to a free ranging and candid discussion that has
been characteristic of our past meetings with the
Commission.
As you are aware, the program funding in recent
years has been anything but stable, following the sharp
increase in the program's budget. For fiscal '95, it became
apparent that funding levels for fiscal '96 and beyond would
not support the activities and the milestones that had been
laid out in the 1994 program plan.
Faced with a 40 percent reduction in budget, DOE's
Office of Civilian Radioactive Management had to reduce the
scope of its activities and then set tougher priorities for
its efforts for the coming years.
Does is now pursuing this viability assessment for
siting a repository at Yucca Mountain to be completed in
1998. Viability is affirmation of life and the purpose of
this assessment seems to be to decide whether or not
continued site studies and repository design efforts are
warranted. The relationship between the viability
assessment and an evaluation of the technical suitability of
the Yucca Mountain site is really unclear.
In the Board's view, a recommendation of the site
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to the President should require an assessment that it is
technically suitable for development of a repository. The
Board has defined suitability to mean a high probability
that the site, along with the appropriate engineered
barriers, can provide long-term waste isolation. The 1998
viability assessment appears to be a less well documented
and less conclusive evaluation of the site's potential.
Slide five shows the general configuration of the
exploratory studies facility, including the location of the
test alcoves and the thermal test facility now being
constructed off the main tunnel.
Slide six also illustrates the general layout of
the ESF but this time shows its relationship to the two
blocks where the radioactive waste might be emplaced in the
repository.
Recently, one of the most visible parts of the
program has been the operation of the TBM to construct the
exploratory studies facility. The Board was an early
advocate of underground exploration at the Yucca Mountain
site and remains so today. The exploration at Yucca
Mountain has provided a number of geological insights that
would have been difficult to obtain from surface based
activities.
Underground exploration has indicated, so far,
that the quality of the rock inside Yucca Mountain is better
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than anticipated from surface mapping. The discovery,
however, of elevated levels of chlorine 36 at a few
locations suggests that pathways exist along which
occasional pulses of precipitation can penetrate very
rapidly to the repository level.
One of the most important tasks ahead for the DOE,
as it evaluates the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site,
will be to determine how widespread, how numerous and how
fast these paths are, how much water they carry and how
often that water flows to the repository level. It would
also be very useful to know whether they continue downward
to the water table.
While somewhat less visible, substantial progress
also has been made in developing a technically credible
waste isolation strategy for a potential repository at Yucca
Mountain's site. As this slide indicates, the strategy is
based on two primary goals: Near complete containment of
radionuclides within the waste packages for several thousand
years and acceptably low annual doses to members of the
public living near the site.
The strategy contemplates achieving these goals by
relying on five engineered and geologic barriers which the
DOE refers to as attributes to isolate the waste from the
accessible human environment.
The Board believes that the strategy must be
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soundly grounded in credible and testable hypotheses
concerning the interactions between the engineered and the
natural components of the repository over long periods that
accommodate change in climate, in geology, hydrologic,
geochemical and ecological processes occurring at the site.
If soundly developed, demonstration of probable
performance of the strategy will provide a technically
supportable basis for setting the priorities for future
activities at Yucca Mountain and for the repository design
efforts.
Another area of progress for the DOE during 1995
was completion of a more detailed, total system performance
assessment for the Yucca Mountain repository. This analysis
projects, based on current knowledge, how well and over what
period a repository would be able to isolate waste. Equally
important, it helps identify the most important parameters
affecting performance, again allowing the DOE to better
focus its future studies of those parameters.
Changes in the legislative and regulatory
environment have affected the U.S. high-level nuclear waste
program from its inception. As you know, changes in the
basic health and safety standards for a Yucca Mountain
repository are now under consideration as directed by
Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 1992.
For some time, the Board has believed that current
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regulations and perhaps the health and safety standards
governing spent fuel disposal needed to be updated. Current
EPA health and safety standard and the NRC and the DOE
regulations were really too detailed and probably enacted
too early in the process of searching for a permanent
repository site.
Scientific and technical knowledge, particularly
when applied to a first-of-a-kind undertaking, take time to
evolve. In retrospect, a wiser course may have been to
collect that knowledge and to use it in developing a
regulatory framework.
In the absence of such an approach, the Board
believes that the NAS report and the current scientific and
technical understanding of the conditions at the Yucca
Mountain site should provide a basis for revising safety
standards and regulations. However, the standards in the
proposed regulations are well above risk levels and well
below the time periods for assuring safety that are being
considered by other nations.
In response to a request from the EPA, the Board
expressed its view on several key issues raised by the NAS
report. The Board stated its belief that if the EPA's
standards for a Yucca Mountain repository are to apply for
more than 10,000 years, appropriate language should be
included in the standards to accommodate the increasing
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levels of uncertainty in projected human health risks over a
very long period.
The Board noted that the stringency of the
standards for the long-term performance of a repository at
Yucca Mountain also will depend on the definition of the
critical group. The Board endorsed the general concept of a
probabilistic critical group but the alternatives suggested
in the NAS report, a subsistence farmer critical group,
seems overly conservative for a site like Yucca Mountain
which has a harsh climate and lacks arable land.
A reasonable analysis using a probabilistic
approach should consider alternative lifestyles by which
individuals could be exposed to releases from a repository.
The Board stated its belief that incremental risk, if any,
associated with the gaseous carbon 14 releases from Yucca
Mountain repository should be considered negligible and
beyond regulatory concern. The Board also stated that it
agreed with the NAS that there is no scientific basis for
predicting the probability of inadvertent human intrusion
over the long time periods of interest for a Yucca Mountain
repository and, accordingly, intrusion analysis should not
be required and should not be used during the licensing to
determine the acceptability of the candidate repository.
In its letter to EPA, the board noted that the
form the standards eventually take could have significant
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implications for repository design.
For example, if the repository standards apply out
to a million years, this may serve as a disincentive to
spend money to develop more robust engineered barriers or to
seek a better quantitative assessment of retardation in the
natural barriers. The board believes that wherever
practical releases should be delayed through the use of
repository design and engineered barriers.
Above all, the board has urged the EPA to keep the
standards simple. In the board's view there are limits to
what scientific knowledge can accomplish and the standards
should recognize and be consistent with those limits.
The board also thinks it may be time to look at
the overall process that the U.S. uses in siting, building
and licensing a permanent repository. The time may have
come to establish a process that acknowledges the need to
adapt to changing information. There are a variety of ways
of accomplishing this from changing the program's
organizational structure to changing the manner in which the
repository is licensed.
For example, a more realistic approach to
developing a repository may be to license and construct it
in increments, say, of 10,000 to 20,000 metric tons while
maintaining assured retrievability instead of developing a
final design and securing a license for the full 70,000 or
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more metric tons.
Plans for continued testing and monitoring during
a repository's initial operation phase also seems to be a
very prudent step.
On March 20th, 1996, the board submitted to
Congress a report summarizing its views on the disposal of
storage spent fuel. The board recommended that the focus of
the U.S. policy should continue to be on permanent disposal
of spent fuel and high level waste. The board observes,
however, that centralized storage capacity which currently
is not available in the United States will surely be needed
in the future, especially when the reactors begin to shut
down in larger numbers.
A large, centralized storage facility will be
necessary, one, to facilitate repository operations and
waste handling, and two, to address storage needs which will
increase markedly around 2010, as the slide illustrates.
The board concluded that storing spent fuel at or
near Yucca Mountain now, before the site has been determined
suitable for repository development, risks prejudicing the
decision about the site suitability and may also threaten
the credibility of the waste management program.
It also would exacerbate the problem of limited
resources for the site characterization program.
The board concluded that there are no compelling
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technical or safety reasons to move the spent fuel to a
centralized storage facility for the next several years.
Now there are some other developments which have
gone ahead, and Dr. Cohon will summarize these for the
board.
DR. COHON: Thank you, Dr. Cantlon.
I, too, am very pleased to be here, Chairman
Jackson. This is also a first for me.
Progress in assessing the Yucca Mountain appears
encouraging. The program is beginning to collect geologic
and hydrologic information from the repository horizon.
This will be crucial in determining the suitability of the
site.
If TBM excavation rates can be improved and if
management improvements are made and sustained in other
areas the program should be able to proceed more efficiently
toward a site suitability decision.
It is obvious that efficient progress cannot be
achieved, however, without adequate and stable program
funding. To determine the required level of funding, a
sound technical justification for the planned activities
should be developed.
To a large extent, this justification should flow
naturally from the evolving waste isolation strategy and the
results of total system performance assessment.
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The board is pleased with the progress that was
made in 1995 in the formulation of a waste isolation
strategy and in the use of that strategy to help set
priorities for the activities of the Yucca Mountain project.
During 1996, however, further development of the
waste isolation strategy seems to have slowed. Additional
efforts are needed to continue development of the strategy
and to use it to develop a technical basis for planning
program activities.
Some of the problems that have caused continuing
frustration with the program have yet to be resolved.
Perhaps the most important of these is the perception of
program inefficiency.
The DOE's tardiness in articulating a technical
basis for its program activities has contributed to these
perceptions.
This sense of inefficiency is heightened by the
DOE's inadequate integration among the various activities in
the program. At times, as we have seen our board meetings,
some program participants seem to have little knowledge of
the activities of other participants.
The program also continues to be schedule-driven.
Despite the sharp reduction in funding for fiscal year '96
there seems to be an effort within the program to maintain
nearly the same schedules for repository development and
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licensing.
For example, the DOE says that projected funding
will not permit a technical site suitability decision in
1998. The DOE's response has been to maintain a 1998
milestone nevertheless but to give the decision a new name,
a "viability assessment."
The technical basis for the viability assessment
will be less complete than had been anticipated for the
technical site suitability decision.
The board believes it would be better to establish
a strong technical basis derived from the waste isolation
strategy and total system performance assessments to
determine the scope of work required, then more technically
defensible schedules and decision points could be
established.
Perhaps the single most important technical
decision facing this program is evaluating the suitability
of the Yucca Mountain candidate site. For the next two
years the program will focus on a viability assessment of
the site, however. As we understand it, this decision of
viability is not a finding that the site is suitable for
development as a repository. It is instead merely a
determination that the site continues to be a live candidate
that requires additional studies leading to a site
suitability decision in 2001 and completion of a license
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application in 2002.
Senate Bill 1936, as we understand it, currently
to stand would move the site recommendation forward in time
to 1998 with a much diminished technical basis for that
decision.
The board believes that additional studies beyond
those planned for the viability assessment will be needed to
evaluate the site suitability, most notably an east-west
excavation across the candidate repository block.
Years of underground construction worldwide show
that no amount of surface-based testing can eliminate the
necessity for underground exploration and testing. It is
the board's position that a technically defensible
evaluation of the site cannot be made without exploration
that would eliminate or greatly decrease existing hydrologic
uncertainties.
The board continues to believe that an east-west
crossing of the geologic block west of the Ghost Dance
fault, i.e., in the upper waste emplacement block, is
necessary prior to any technically defensible decision on
site suitability and in evaluation of the adequacy of its
disposal capacity.
The current desire for the repository has all or
almost all waste emplacement in the upper waste emplacement
block west of the existing tunnel. This block, which is 4
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kilometers long and 1.2 kilometers wide, has not been
explored by drilling or by subsurface exploration.
Without the east-west exploration the geologic and
hydrologic uncertainties of the unexplored portion of the
repository block must be extrapolated -- the geologic and
hydrologic characteristics, I'm sorry, of the unexplored
portion of the repository block would have to be
extrapolated from those found in the portal-to-portal loop,
the current tunnel.
Exploration of such a long distance would be
difficult to justify technically.
The 1996 revision of the DOE's program plan shows
completion of an East-West excavation if deemed necessary.
However, even if undertaken, this excavation would not be
completed before the 1998 viability assessment.
In the board's view a technically supportable
decision about the suitability of the site for a repository
of adequate capacity simply cannot be made without the
information that would be obtained from an east-west
excavation across the block.
Initial results from underground tunnel scale
heater experiments also will be needed to predict better the
movement of water in the rocks surrounding the hot waste
packages. The DOE is now excavating facilities for these
tests but the tests cannot be completed and the results
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evaluated before the 1998 viability assessment.
The board cautions against making more of the
viability assessment than it merits. Additional information
will be needed beyond that which will be available for the
viability assessment before a technically-supportable
decision can be made about the suitability of the Yucca
Mountain site.
The board believes that adequate information can
be acquired within four to five years to support a
suitability decision about the Yucca Mountain site but
adequate and stable program funding will be needed if this
goal is to be achieved.
This concludes our prepared presentation. We will
be happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay, thank you.
Let me start by asking you a couple of questions.
Let's talk explicitly for a moment about the east-
west crossing that you talked about and the words I guess in
your report indicated that the DOE's program plan shows
completion of that east-west excavation if deemed necessary.
Has there been any movement with respect to
renormalization of DOE's program plan with respect to
contemplation of that?
DR. CANTLON: Not that we are aware of. They are
aware of our concern about it. I think they concede that at
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some point it would be necessary but they doubt that they
are going to have the funding to get it done before the
viability assessment.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Another question was in the
view of your board to what extent is the DOE program even in
this renamed or renormalized program focused on, still
focused on the most important issues perhaps without the
depth you would like to see, or is it in any way likely to
be compromising of the ultimate suitability evaluation that
you feel is necessary in order to determine the significant
attributes?
DR. COHON: Well, let me give you my opinion on
that.
I don't believe they've lost their way. I don't
believe that they are moving in directions that are
inconsistent with the suitability determination.
We would like to believe that a viability
determination is a step along the way towards suitability
and in fact we believe that to be the case.
What concerns us is the pressures on the program,
both funding and otherwise, which may lead the program to
renormalize -- that's a good word, Chairman Jackson -- so
that viability assessment becomes equated with suitability
determination.
As our statement indicated, we believe that simply
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is not true. That is going farther than viability
assessment can take you.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Let me switch it over.
Assuming that you have a familiarity with what the NRC has
been doing, and you know that the NRC Staff has been
focusing on these key technical issues, to what extent do
you feel that they are in fact the appropriate issues to
focus on for evaluating repository performance or the safety
performance thereof?
DR. CANTLON: Well, clearly if one wants to put
spent fuel in that site for a very long period of time the
real challenge is to have that material retained above the
water table in such a substantial way that the small pulses
that get there over the longer period of time will then be
diluted out before it gets out to where people will have
access to it.
We think that if you now look at that challenge,
the geo-hydrology of the site is really the critical set of
issues and the finding of Chlorine 36 enriched waters at the
repository level tells you that bomb-affected water has
gotten there in 50 years, which isn't in an of itself a veto
of the site because if those occasions and if those places
are both very dispersed -- in other words, only a rare
event, one of the big thunderstorms that occurs, a 100 year
type flood -- and if it occurs in only a very few places,
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then the emplacement process which repositories around the
world have conceded that you are not going to be able to
randomly place waste packages in the earth. You have to pay
attention to what the geology is, and by avoiding those
places.
So that is the one challenge -- to really
document -- and that is why we are so fixed on the idea that
until one knows in an east-west crossing that the bulk of
the area that is needed for waste emplacement isn't even
more permeated with Chlorine 36 pathways, it's very
difficult to assume that that site will have the capacity to
handle the spent fuel so it's the capacity issue.
Then one needs to look at the rigor, the
robustness of the engineered barriers and obviously this is
a conflict between the economics of doing the job and the
security that in the long range the transuranics are
actually going to be contained long enough and so the
question of what the backfill should be like and whether or
not there should be fillers in the package.
I personally -- I don't know how widely this is
shared in our board -- but my own personal view is that any
time you have large void spaces in a waste package,
eventually as that package crumbles, its strength
deteriorates, you are going to end up with little pockets as
those void spaces essentially create little pockets over
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each waste package. Well, that is an invitation to
mobility, and so I think the idea of putting fillers in the
package is good.
Now what that does is to give you a real headache.
Who's going to do it? The utilities? Or are you going to
do it centrally out at the site? What are you going to use?
There are a lot of economic and safety issues that
relate from that, but if you really want to look at long-
range safety, I think you need fillers and you need
backfill.
DR. COHON: With regard to the question of whether
we, both our Board and your Commission, are looking at the
right issues, I think the big unknown here is what you
started your remarks with. That is, what is the pending
standard that we expect to be coming out from the
Environmental Protection Agency. That will have profound
implications on what we need to look at and, depending on
how that comes out, it will be interesting to see how both
the program and NRC respond to that. This is further
complicated and made uncertain by pending legislation.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Let me do one last question. I
keep saying they are "last." You have to beware of people
who have five last questions.
DR. COHON: Can we hold you to five?
[Laughter.]
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CHAIRMAN JACKSON: I am going to read from your
prepared statement here. It says the Board believes it
would be better to establish a strong technical basis
derived from the waste isolation strategy which you have
just been speaking to and total performance assessments to
determine the scope of work required and, of course,
referenced to the appropriate standards. And then I do note
that you made a comment that, at times, some of the DOE
program participants seemed to have little knowledge of the
activities of the other participants.
Why am I bringing these two up in the same
paragraph? I had made some note of something like that when
I visited Yucca Mountain last year but I guess the question
becomes does that not have impact on being able to make a
total system performance assessment if all the pieces are
not communicating?
DR. COHON: Absolutely. The approach that the DOE
has developed to deal with that particular issue is the
creation of working groups around specific pieces of the
total system performance assessment. These working groups
include both technical managers and the modelers of the
performance assessment activity, as well as the scientists
who are doing the data collection. These working groups,
then, are intended to develop a single coordinated,
integrated component of the total system performance
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assessment. This is just now happening so we can't comment
yet on how effective this is.
We are keenly aware from our sense of history with
this program that the program has made a very significant
transition from a science-based program without a great deal
of focus or direction in terms of trying to integrate or
coordinate to one where the design, the waste isolation
strategy and total system performance assessment are the
dominant activities. It is not easy for a program this
large to make such a dramatic transition and that is what
they are struggling with.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: I am told that your Board
doesn't consider vulcanism to be a significant issue,
although it has been something that our staff has focused
on. Can you speak a little bit to that?
DR. CANTLON: Yes. I am a biologist and Jerry is
an engineer, so we are clearly out of our technical depth
here. But the geologists that have looked at and examined
the whole set of issues, it has to do basically with the
orientation of the past areas of vulcanism and whether one
projects that orientation, avoiding that block or not
avoiding the block. That is really the basic issue.
You know, it is extremely low probability, even
assuming an orientation toward Yucca Mountain. So we don't
think that that is going to be a project killer.
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CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner Rogers?
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: Well, maybe I can ask
something that is in your field and that is the definition
of the critical group. I wonder if you could comment a
little bit on how you see that issue, which really still is
getting quite a bit of attention outside of the National
Academy study, particularly because the one dissenting
opinion was offered by a very distinguished leader in the
field, Professor Pickeford, in which he took the maximally
exposed individual approach and was very comfortable with
the subsistence farmer as a definition of that for a number
of different reasons that I think he explained in his
dissenting opinion.
How do you see that controversy? I am not quite
sure how to interpret your comments here with respect to the
definition of the critical group following a probabilistic
definition or concept. Would you elaborate on that a little
bit?
DR. COHON: Chairman Cantlon has designated me the
expert on this, so I will try to give you an intelligent
response.
This issue, as you point out, is a general one
that doesn't just, of course, affect the standard for the
Yucca Mountain repository but in fact is a key issue in risk
assessment generally. I think that -- well, let me first
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explain the Board's position and try to explain the
philosophy, if you will, that is behind it.
The Board's position was to subscribe to the
notion that we don't know and can't know what population
will live in or near -- in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain.
Therefore, let's take an approach which assigns
probabilities to various kinds of populations, to various
critical groups. That is what we meant by that. That is
what the report recommended.
Why would we recommend that and not support the
notion of the maximally exposed critical group? I think the
argument here goes like this. Our colleagues on the Board
who are expert on this could probably give you a better
discussion. When you are talking about a situation like
this where we are trying to look out so far into the future
and where it is impossible to know or even, I would claim,
even to characterize the populations that will be there, on
what basis do you choose a maximally exposed critical group?
I mean, one has to fabricate it. In the spirit of
probabilistic risk assessment, it seems only appropriate
then that you should apply probabilities to those critical
groups rather than choosing one and designing and planning
for that one when you can't know what that one is.
This problem, being one of a kind and so far in
the future with so much uncertainty, is distinctive, I
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think. There are other risk assessment situations where you
can't know in advance that a person or a group will be
exposed but at least the group exists and you know that they
do something or live in a place so that they have a
reasonable probability of being exposed. That's not so in
this case. I am sure Professor Pickeford could give a
wonderful and very rapid response to what I just said to
support his position, but I think I have explained the
rationale.
DR. CANTLON: One additional element in that
discussion, I am a native of Nevada so I grew up in the
desert and know that country and it is a little difficult to
visualize a subsistence farmer anywhere near Yucca Mountain
in today's climate so now one has to project ahead to
pluvial periods. If you project ahead to pluvial periods in
that area, the data that we have from pack rat middens and
other kinds of data to identify what vegetation and so on
was there, gets you up to about sagebrush level, which is
also the kind of vegetation that you have in the northern
reaches of the Nevada test site.
If you now project that around the state of
Nevada, there are very -- there are almost no subsistence
farmers in that environment. You have ranches, people
living off of ranches, but they use surface water. You
don't drill a well 1,000 feet deep and try to haul water up
. 29
to do a subsistence farm. It is just not a credible thing
for that environment today and it is even of shaky
credibility projecting it to the pluvial period, you know,
consistent with the Ice Age environment.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: Just one other question.
How do you feel about the communication between
the Technical Review Board and NRC staff? How do you feel
that has gone and how do you see that in the future?
DR. CANTLON: Our communication is excellent. We
have raided you for two of our outstanding professional
staff.
[Laughter.]
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: Oh, you did? I am not sure
that was quite what I was getting at.
[Laughter.]
DR. CANTLON: So these individuals, Dan Fehringer
and Leon Reiter, have substantial NRC experience and have
colleagues here and so I don't think we have felt at any
time away from your technical people. Now, obviously, as
the Commission has come into its own conditions you, like
any organization, have to protect your information and there
are periods in which credibility is counterproductive.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner Dicus?
COMMISSIONER DICUS: I have no questions. Thank
you.
. 30
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Let me ask you one more
question here.
I note that you do make a point about the
standards in the proposed legislation in the Congress being
well above risk levels and below the time periods being
considered in other nations. Is that in your prepared
statement from the point of view of diplomatic or political
difficulty or because you feel the standards being
contemplated are moving away from what would have a
reasonable technical foundation?
DR. CANTLON: Let me take a crack at that,
Chairman Jackson.
I am particularly troubled with the 1,000 year
standard proposed in the legislation. Now, obviously, when
you write a standard, you are writing a law and, since very
few governments have survived 1,000 years, I can understand
a kind of legal rationale for that. But it does seem to me
that if one looks at responsible intergenerational and now
we are talking multigenerational relationships, 1,000 years
is really an inadequate time.
Now, as I understand that language, it is the
obligation of the NRC to characterize if not to establish
the regulation so I think if it is sharply characterized out
to 10,000 years, that would not -- I think that is, in
simply recognizing the fact that laws don't exist for
. 31
multiples of thousands of years, as far as we know.
Now, as far as the 100 millirem standard is
concerned, that is substantially above international things
and while I personally believe that the basic data for
radiation effects at levels below 100 millirem are almost
nonexistent really in terms of solid data, it doesn't
trouble me as a level but it is an international problem in
that other nuclear nations have adopted much more stringent
levels of protection. Since you have a great deal of public
concern about it, that is going to give us a problem, I
think.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Dr. Cohon, did you have a
comment you wanted to make?
DR. COHON: Nothing, thank you.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay. The last last question.
In what sense do you believe, and this is just for
my technical edification, that the quality of the rock is
better than anticipated? And this is based on the surface
data.
DR. CANTLON: It simply means that there are
bigger areas in which the fracturing is not as profound and
that the quality of the fracture surfaces are such that it
doesn't indicate a great deal of water movement.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay.
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your
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coming for an excellent session. You have raised, in fact,
many of the same concerns that the NRC has had with the
high-level waste radioactive program and many others that we
will consider, you know, as we move along through this
prelicensing phase.
We appreciate your taking the time to come here
and brief us. We won't wait another two years. There is
too much that changes in the interim.
Commissioner Rogers, do you have any additional
comments?
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: No.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner Dicus?
COMMISSIONER DICUS: No.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Thank you.
This meeting is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 10:48 a.m., the briefing was
concluded.]
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