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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
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BRIEFING ON SITE DECOMMISSIONING
MANAGEMENT PLAN (SDMP)
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PUBLIC MEETING
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Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Commission Hearing Room
11555 Rockville Pike
Rockville, Maryland
Monday, October 7, 1996
The Commission met in open session, pursuant to
notice, at 2:05 p.m., the Honorable SHIRLEY A. JACKSON,
Chairman of the Commission, presiding.
COMMISSIONERS PRESENT:
SHIRLEY A. JACKSON, Chairman of the Commission
KENNETH C. ROGERS, Member of the Commission
GRETA J. DICUS, Member of the Commission
EDWARD McGAFFIGAN, JR., 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
CARL PAPERIELLO, Director, NMSS
MARGARET FEDERLINE, Deputy Director, Division of
Waste Management, NMSS
MICHAEL WEBER, Chief, Low-Level Waste and
Decommissioning Projects Branch, NMSS
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P R O C E E D I N G S
[10:00 a.m.]
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Well, good afternoon, everyone.
Today, the staff will update the Commission on the
status of the Site Decommissioning Management Plan or the
SDMP. The staff last briefed the Commission in May of '95
on this program when I was just showing up, as I recall.
The Commission is provided a detailed description
of the program every other year. In this nonreporting year,
the Commission receives just a summary of significant SDMP
activities, however given that you essentially have a new
Commission you should keep that in mind in terms of on-the-
spot renormalization of your remarks.
Along with this briefing, the staff has prepared a
commission paper, SECY 96-207, that describes the
significant SDMP activities and the paper details progress
on removing sites from the SDMP and notes that six sites
have been removed since May of '95 and five other sites have
had decommissioning plans approved. However, the NRC itself
is faced with a number of policy issues that I hope we will
discuss today, including DOE acceptance of Title II and
custody for long-term institutional control and so that is a
request to have you explicitly discuss it. And the possible
use of a generic environmental impact statement for a number
of uranium thorium contaminated sites. And that is also a
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specific request. We look forward to hearing the staff's
views on these issues.
Finally, let me say that there is a direction-
setting issue paper on decommissioning of materials licenses
as part of a strategic assessment and rebaselining. The
Commission looks forward to receiving stakeholder comments
on this issue at upcoming meetings in Colorado Springs,
Chicago and Washington.
Now, I understand that copies of the staff's paper
and charts are available at the entrances to the meeting so
if my fellow commissioners don't have any beginning
comments, Mr. Taylor, please.
MR. TAYLOR: Good afternoon. With me at the table
are Carl Paperiello, Margaret Federline and Mike Weber from
the Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards.
At the last briefing of the Commission on Site
Decommissioning Plan in May of last year, there were
Commission suggestions and, following those suggestions, the
staff will focus today on three specific sites to emphasize
the policy, regulatory and technical issues associated with
the decommissioning of sites under the Site Decommissioning
Management Plan and the staff's involvement with the public
in this program.
Margaret and Mike will present the meeting.
Margaret will provide an overview and background information
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on the Site Decommissioning Management Plan and summarize
staff responses to previous Commission direction. Mike will
address the current SDMP issues, focusing on those three
sites that I mentioned and for which environmental impact
statements are currently being developed.
These sites do illustrate the regulatory policy
and technical issues that are associated with some of the
more complicated sites under our plan. Mike will conclude
the presentation with discussion of the common issues for
these sites, reliance on long-term institutional controls
and the staff's forward view of the program. Margaret will
continue.
MS. FEDERLINE: Good afternoon. We appreciate the
opportunity to meet with you this afternoon to discuss
staff's approach to decommissioning the tens of sites where
licensees propose solution to decommissioning falls outside
the envelope of the regulations.
Now, the regulations define decommissioning as the
release of property for unrestricted use following the
termination of a license. Now, less than 10 percent of our
materials licensees require this complex decommissioning,
primarily fuel cycle and industrial facilities.
Although under controls, routine controls, usually
there is not an eminent threat to the public health and
safety, these sites do have the potential to have doses in
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exceedence of public dose limits, so this is the source of
our concern.
Now, the sites present unique concerns with
varying degrees of hazard, sophistication of remediation
approaches and varying degrees of cost. Now, some
responsible parties may not be able or they may be unwilling
to commit to decommissioning and so this is another
complexity in the process.
Additional complexity comes from litigation that
is involved as well as the extensive coordination that is
involved with the interested parties. Now, despite the
complexity that I have laid out, progress in the program has
been steady over the past year. As the Chairman indicated,
11 sites have been removed, six since May of 1995 and this
exceeds the goals that we had set for ourselves.
We do have a poster that is very difficult to see,
but this establishes our 1997 goals.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Could someone lift that up?
MS. FEDERLINE: This establishes our 1997 goals
and gives you an idea of where we stand right now. The
little pink diamonds represent -- and these are the various
components of our decommissioning process so it just gives
you an idea of where we are.
We do have 45 sites that are left, though, on the
list so we have a lot of progress that we need to make.
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Although we routinely consult --
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Thank you, Mike.
[Laughter.]
MS. FEDERLINE: Although we routinely consult with
the Commission when we terminate a site from this list, we
thought it was appropriate today to discuss these technical
policy issues with you and get your ideas on any other
approaches that we should be considering.
Could I have Slide 2, please?
[Slide.]
MS. FEDERLINE: Today, I will briefly discuss the
background of this program, I will discuss the previous
briefing and Commission direction, what activities we have
taken to respond to the Commission direction and I will
summarize the current issues that are facing us. Then Mike
Weber will discuss some example cases and get into the
technical, regulatory and policy issues for each of these
specific cases. Then we will summarize how we see moving
forward in this program.
Could I have the next slide, please? Slide 3,
please?
[Slide.]
MS. FEDERLINE: Thank you.
The SDMP program has largely been initiated in
response to Commission and congressional reviews. Back in
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1989, there was a review of NRC's decommissioning procedures
and criteria and GAO reported that certain sites had not
been decommissioned appropriately and that the
decommissioning process had taken too long. In August of
'89, there was a House subcommittee hearing and the
Commission committed to improve its decommissioning process
and provided direction to the staff to develop a site
decommissioning management plan which is summarized on this
slide.
The Commission approved the plan in March of 1990
and it incorporates the three components that I have listed
here on the slide. First, it identifies the contaminated
sites requiring additional NRC management attention, it
attempts to identify the policy and legal issues that we
believe have impeded speedy decommissioning and it presents
a program management approach to resolve the regulatory and
legal issues and to oversee site remediation.
Now, as the Chairman mentioned in her opening
remarks, we do provide a biennial update to the SDMP plan.
This is a complete revision of the plan. On the alternative
years, we provide you a summary of just the activities that
have been conducted to fulfill the plan.
May I have the next slide, please?
[Slide.]
MS. FEDERLINE: Remediation continued to lag in
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1990 and 1991 and the Commission felt that it would be
important to establish an action plan to compel timely
cleanups. So in April of '92, the Commission approved the
Site Decommissioning Management Action Plan. This
identified the interim release criteria that would be in
place until a rule could be put in place. It also stated
the objectives for timely remediation. And another
important aspect was it confirmed finality. It ensured
licensees that if they decommissioned to an approved
decommissioning plan, the Commission would not come back and
revisit this decision.
In 1992, there was additional congressional
interest in the program. The Senate Governmental Affairs
Committee held a hearing and they focused on their
dissatisfaction with EPA in putting appropriate standards
into place and, at that point, they acknowledged the
additional effort that staff had been putting into
completing the decommissioning program.
But in 1994, the General Accounting Office
reported on a review that they did in 1993 saying that there
was slow progress being made in the decommissioning program
and they acknowledged the increased efforts that the Agency
was putting into the program but they noted issues that are
really outside the control of the Agency. Those are
litigation concerns, coordination issues. They noted sites
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that couldn't meet the unrestricted release criteria and
they also noted the limited availability and high cost of
off-site disposal.
So with that as a backdrop, the staff last met
with the Commission in May of 1995 and we have taken
numerous actions to respond to the Commission direction
following that meeting. We have evaluated the continuity of
project management, we have evaluated the business process
reengineering, we have consulted with the ACNW on the
regulated community and we have implemented program
improvements described in the '95 SECY paper.
Because of time, I will just touch on one or two
of these. In the area of evaluating continuity of project
management, we provided a memo to the Commission in late
1995. We did evaluate the turnover of our project managers
in the decommissioning program and that we concluded our
assignment criteria were appropriate but, as with any
program, as the program matured, the people got rotational
assignments, they were promoted into other positions and the
turnover was really, we felt, a result of the maturing
program. But we wanted to look further.
Although you can expect some turnover, we felt it
was important to look at the management tools and the
training that could perhaps provide a bridge over any staff
turnovers that were occurring. We did put in place a Site
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Decommissioning Management Plan database which allows us to
track the commitments and track the next actions despite
turnover of project managers.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Has there been any turnover
since that, since December of '95?
MR. WEBER: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: And how many sites have been
affected by that?
MR. WEBER: I can't give you a specific number but
I know that there has been, even in my own branch, turnover
where project managers have been assigned to other projects
and in some cases they've come back and in other cases they
haven't come back.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: So what impact does that have
on the work at the sites?
MR. WEBER: What we try to do is manage that
turnover so that we minimize those kinds of impacts. We
hopefully work the new project manager and the old project
manager together for some time so that there is a turnover
of useful information, commitments, assignments. We have
tried to mitigate, to the extent we can, through management
of that activity so there is continuity in the direct
supervisor for those activities.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Have you, in fact, verified
that there is minimal impact?
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MR. WEBER: We believe that there is minimal
impact but we often hear from the licensees concerns about
new project managers coming on board, concerns that it is
delaying the turnaround time on some of the reviews, the
decommissioning plans, things of that nature.
MS. FEDERLINE: One additional aspect that we put
into place is a decommissioning manual chapter and this
provides guidance from soup to nuts on how to conduct a
decommissioning and a decommissioning review, just to ensure
that if a project manager is newer, that there will be a
continuous source of guidance and we feel that that is going
to be very effective. That will go into place very shortly.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: I think it is important that
you, in fact, track what the impact is. Otherwise you have
no basis for judging the effectiveness of the bridges and
not unduly affecting progress at these sites.
MS. FEDERLINE: Next, I will just touch upon the
implementation of program improvements that we described in
our '95 SECY paper. We felt it was important to promote a
more focused review of the site characterization data with
the decommissioning plan and so we have now, as -- we used
to do those in series. Now we do them in parallel to make
sure that any review of site characterization data is
conducted in light of the decommissioning approach that is
planed to be used at the site. And we really feel that this
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gives us a more focused review.
Another respect, and this was one that ACNW picked
upon, was the importance of confirming that contamination
has, in fact, been released.
What we have done in the past is highly dependent
on our confirmatory survey program. What we would like to
do is enhance confidence in the licensee's own measurement
program and so we have put into place some additional QA
measures, we're doing some end process inspections that
allow us to develop confidence in the licensee's process,
and therefore, we can back off on our own confirmatory
measures program.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Before you go on, I think also
the ACNW had recommended that in terms of how you prioritize
the sites, that you try to quantify your approach to that as
much as possible.
I think back in May I had asked you a question
about how well you'd been able to quantify the risks and
fold that into your prioritization. Have you been able to
do any of that?
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes, we have made some progress in
that area. We've developed a hazards prioritization system
which we are applying to the terminated license reviews.
This actually gets into the risk posed by those sites and
the immediacy with which we deal with them in our program.
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We're also implementing --
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: So you're saying, you, in fact,
then do use them to prioritize?
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes, we do.
We're also developing a screening methodology to
review the sites where previous disposals had occurred. The
Commission had directed us to give some scrutiny to those
sites at the time the facility was decommissioned and what
we've defined as a process for risk significance as to
whether any additional action needs to be taken at those
sites. So we are moving in that area.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Have there been any where
you've come back and decided there is need for additional
action?
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes. Let me ask Mike to address
that in detail.
MR. WEBER: In terms of the risk posed by the
contamination?
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: No. The Commission -- I thank
Dr. Federline for bringing that up -- in fact, did ask that
the staff look at sites where previous disposal had occurred
and reevaluate in terms of risk, et cetera, or as you would
say, hazards prioritization.
The question is were there sites you found where
there, in fact, was need for additional action. If so,
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what's been done?
MR. WEBER: Absolutely. We're in the front edge
of the application of that screening methodology that
Margaret referred to. In fact, we haven't published that
yet for broad use by the license community, but we have been
applying the same sort of methodology.
We've applied it, for example, at the University
of South Dakota where we found in that case it was suitable
to release the former disposal because the contamination
didn't pose that great a risk.
In other cases, however, like the sites we'll be
talking about today, if you applied the methodology, you
will find that they have enough inventory, enough activity,
to pose significant risk such that this kind of high level
review is appropriate.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: I guess what I'm also trying to
get at is whether you think there's any vulnerability in
terms of having any significant number of previously
disposed of sites having to be reworked in some way?
One is thinking about it both from a policy
perspective in terms of the application of the methodology
but also a resource perspective in terms of what this is
going to look like going forward relative to those things
already on the list.
MS. FEDERLINE: Right.
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CHAIRMAN JACKSON: I haven't quite --
MS. FEDERLINE: We feel that we need a method so
that we focus our resources on those sites that are most
important. We feel, between the hazards ranking method --
we feel we have a pretty good handle on the sites that are
existing on the SDMP.
The wild cards are the terminated license reviews
and we feel like we have hazards methodology that we are
applying there.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: So you're saying with respect
to the already terminated licenses, you're just now
beginning to apply these screening criteria?
MS. FEDERLINE: That's correct.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: So in x months, you'll have a
better handle on just how large the issue is? Is that a
fair statement?
MS. FEDERLINE: Right. Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: So when do you think you'll
have your hands around that?
MS. FEDERLINE: I would think it will probably
take us an additional -- in terms of the terminated license
reviews, we've got about 7,000 more of those to go. We
already have identified sum six additional sites that will
be put on SDMP, but it will probably take us the rest of the
year to complete the terminated license reviews and have a
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full appreciation for what the impact might be.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: So next spring, say March, you
could be providing by March a report to the Commission on
the status of that review of the terminated licenses?
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes.
MR. WEBER: Yes. I wanted to amplify a little bit
what Margaret said.
In addition to the terminated license reviews, we
also, of course, anticipate that the timeliness rule will
stimulate licensees to submit notifications like these
former burials. So you really have, now, two different
populations to deal with.
The timeliness rule does not, itself, apply to
formerly licensed facilities, but it does apply to licensees
that currently operate and have these unused outdoor areas
or formerly used buildings.
I think by next spring, we'll have insights into
both the old burials as well as the application of the
terminated licenses.
We have, as a first step in applying that hazards
methodology, applied it to sites that were identified as
being contaminated as part of that terminated license
review.
We went through and we wanted to correlate the
scores they got through the Oak Ridge ranking system versus
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what we believe the relative risk may be. So we're trying
to benchmark our systems so that we can have some confidence
when they do identify a site with a fairly high score that
indeed, it is a site that warrants more attention.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: This is the kind of question or
it retracts into the kind of question that Congress is
particularly interested in.
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: In terms of how we are working
off the problem, and you mentioned finality and this is part
of that process.
MS. FEDERLINE: Right.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner Dicus?
COMMISSIONER DICUS: With both, some sites might
be added to the list in the foreseeable future because of
the work we're doing on the terminated license, together
with any sites we might have already released thinking they
were decontaminated or they didn't need to be contaminated
when found out they do.
Who is accountable for cleaning up these sites,
particularly some of these, the licensee obviously no longer
exists, the company is gone, the people are gone?
I think there is a process in place, but I need --
MS. FEDERLINE: Our first intent is if there is a
licensee, then the licensee is the responsible party and we
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attempt to recover.
If there is not a licensee in place, then we
attempt to go after the current responsible party.
MR. WEBER: The propertyowner in most cases.
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: What tool do we have, what
enforcement tool do we have?
MR. WEBER: My understanding is if somebody is in
possession of source special nuclear by-product material,
that if we have an adequate safety basis, can issue orders,
for example, to compel action.
MR. TAYLOR: That was an action we took, I can't
remember the exact date. We knew we needed incentives to
get site cleanup, so we presented a program some four or
five years ago during a period of some of the matters that
Margaret mentioned of an approach, and the Commission
approved using enforcement orders and certain -- I can't
recall the specific amount -- civil penalty levels which
would be accrued separately for ultimate use of
decommissioning.
I think perhaps one or two of you remember those
policies that we presented to the Commission.
We actually, to the best of my knowledge, have
issued one order -- isn't that right?
MS. FEDERLINE: We issued an order to Chemetron.
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MR. TAYLOR: Chemetron. With regard to the rest
of the work that's been going on where there are licensees,
we've been able to work and try to get sites cleaned up.
There's quite a list that we've gotten off the list and
gotten acceptable release criteria and we hope finality, so
those policies are still in place.
We knew when we asked for that authority and
decided to do it, that we hoped we didn't have to do it.
That was a very important act by the agency. The issuance
of that one order was a very important action. It was
Chemetron in Ohio.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Do you think it tended to
accelerate things?
MR. TAYLOR: I think it has, but I think it helped
us to make progress.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Good.
MR. TAYLOR: Showed we mean business. Many of
these sites have been around a long time.
MR. WEBER: I'm reminded also, we did issue a
confirmatory order in the case of the Pawling site in New
York. No order was negotiated with the parties, but that
was one mechanism that we had to establish a suitable remedy
for the contamination at that site.
MR. TAYLOR: A slightly different order, but it
was to accomplish a cleanup.
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MR. WEBER: The Commission's general expectations
in the area were laid out in that 1992 action plan. There's
a whole section in there on how we ensure or compel timely
remediation.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay, thanks.
MS. FEDERLINE: Next slide, please.
[Slide.]
MS. FEDERLINE: SDMP sites warrant a special
oversight and management attention because of a complex mix
of technical issues, regulatory issues and policy issues.
Among these are the importance of public involvement.
We believe the staff efforts to involve the
public, though they are extremely timeconsuming and resource
intensive, are extremely important.
I've been out to some of these sites and have seen
the proximity of homes to some of these sites and it's very
understandable that people would want involvement in the
process, and we've been trying.
One way that we've been doing that is through, for
the most highly contaminated sites, developing environmental
impact statements. There are environmental impact
statements underway on all of the sites that we'll be
discussing today and we can illustrate how that process, we
believe, provides some transparency and consideration of
options for disposal.
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The three sites we've chosen today, because of the
diversity of SDMP, are not necessarily representative of all
the sites because the conditions do vary widely among the
sites.
They are illustrative of the complex issues that
face us when we address any one of these sites. That's why
we thought it would be useful to walk through them with you.
No one common issue that you'll notice as we walk
through those sites is the potential need for institutional
controls at these sites, and this is historically different
than NRC's regulatory approach in the past.
Our general approach has been to establish an
unrestricted level that we can walk away from, and for the
vast majority of sites that is achievable and reasonable
because it does not incur the long-term monitoring costs
that would be present with institutional controls, but for
the highly-contaminated sites it does in some cases make
sense to consider institutional controls and we are doing
that as part of the residual radioactivity criteria rule.
Let me now turn it over to Mike, who is Chief of
the Low Level Waste and Decommissioning Projects Branch.
I also want to introduce the project managers who
are on the front row. We have Jim Kennedy, who is the
shieldalloy project manager. We have Jim Shepherd, who is
the Sequoyah Fuels, and we have Heather Astwood, who is
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project manager for the Parks Township site.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Before you begin, Mike, I have
a question I want to ask you about the SECY paper.
In 96-207 you indicate that the Staff is also
evaluating the feasibility of a generic environmental impact
statement.
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: And addressing the onsite
disposal of uranium thorium waste, and you talked about,
what, I think 10 to 20 sites that would be affected, and
there are various obvious resource and regulatory benefits.
The question has to do with are there
vulnerabilities? I mean based on your experience at -- your
past experience with respect to decommissioning sites, how
accepting would you anticipate the public would be, have you
looked at the legal issues, and is there enough commonality
over the 10 to 20 sites with respects to geology, hydrology,
extent of contamination, proximity of residential areas, et
cetera, that you really believe that -- or am I asking you
this too soon in the process?
MR. WEBER: Good questions.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: But what I'll then do is, if
they are good questions and you would not like to answer
them, you will get them as part of the SRA.
[Laughter.]
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MS. FEDERLINE: Well, let me just start, and Mike
can continue.
We are just at the onset of that. We felt it was
necessary to do a range of these sites before we
contemplated a generic, so we have really not embarked upon
the generic assessment yet and we have considered all of the
issues that you brought up.
There is diversity and complexity among these
sites and it could be very difficult.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay.
MR. WEBER: We have developed a task plan to
develop the generic environmental impact statement.
The first phase of that is the feasibility
analysis.
Of what we have seen so far, or let me take a step
back, when we described our intentions in last May's
briefing as well as in SECY 95-209, we said we wanted to
complete draft environmental impact statements on several of
these sites that we will be talking about today.
I think we had hoped to complete three drafts
before we initiated the generic environmental impact
statement.
As Margaret pointed out, the intent was to see how
much similarity is there in terms of the alternatives
available, in terms of the impacts that may be associated
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with the decommissioning actions.
I would think from our interactions at the three
sites that we are -- in the four sites that we are
developing EIS's on now that if a generic EIS were pursued
the public would want some other process that they could be
involved in in the implementation of the results of the
GEIS.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Right.
MR. WEBER: I think there would be a lot of
concern if we did that and excluded the public from having a
meaningful voice in the process, so that would be something
we would have to look at in terms of moving forward with
that plan.
But we did think if we do find sufficient
similarity there that it only makes sense to try to address
this issue generically and not continue to piecemeal it, and
that is what we have got to weigh -- what are the tradeoffs
with that generic approach.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: And I guess your SECY paper
also indicated that onsite disposal of material at those
sites requires an exemption from our existing regulations --
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: -- supported by NEIS, and the
question is, is there anything or are you far enough along
to say whether the regulations themselves perhaps need to be
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changed instead of granting a number of exemptions or are
you going to be evaluating that as part of your --
MS. FEDERLINE: Well, we are considering that as
part of the residual radioactivity rule and generically
implementing standards we would be able to look and say for
a few very highly contaminated sites institutional controls
might be allowed.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: And so that would require
regulatory change, right?
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: That is an interesting issue.
MS. FEDERLINE: It would be desirable.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Right, okay, thank you.
MR. WEBER: If we could have the next slide,
please, Slide 7.
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: The first slide I'll be talking about
is the Parks Township shallow land disposal area. That is
the initial SLDA.
There is also a Parks Township operating facility
that is immediately adjacent to the SLDA and we have to keep
the two separate.
I think the Parks Township site is a good
illustration of some of the technical issues that we are
working on. Now all these sites have technical regulatory
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and policy issues but this one particularly is useful in
illustrating some of these technical issues.
The site is located in Parks Township,
Pennsylvania, and that is about 30 miles northeast of
Pittsburgh. It covers -- the entire land area is about 114
acres, but out of that only about 1.2 acres actually are
occupied by waste trenches.
The trenches are illustrated on that photograph,
that oblique area photograph aside of Margaret, and I have
illustrated on that with while tape one of the trenches so
you can see that it's one trench in a cleared area.
There are additional trenches there and you will
see that in the map in the next diagram.
Now these waste disposal trenches were constructed
back in the late 1950s through about 1970 to take wastes
that were generated at the Apollo nuclear fuel processing
facility, which is just downstream -- or upstream.
NRC or at the time the Atomic Energy Commission
had a regulation on the books, 10 CFR 20.304, that
authorized disposal of radioactive waste provided certain
limits were met, and that disposal did not require prior
site specific authorization by the Commission and in 1981
NRC rescinded that regulation because it encountered various
problems with those prior disposals and it felt that it was
more appropriate to approve them on a site specific basis.
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The burials at Parks as I mentioned took place
between 1959 and about 1070. The site has some rather
undesirable features. One is that it is rather close to
residential areas. If that aerial photograph had a slightly
larger area, you would be able to see just off the slide
homes. The town of Kiskimere is located in close proximity
of the site.
Last year we showed a video to the Commission at
the Commission briefing and I believe you saw some of the
homes in that video.
It is also located above shallow groundwater and
the immediate residents use groundwater.
Finally , it is above a deep coal mine. About 80
feet down is mined out area where coal had been extracted
about a century before or so and now you have all the
problems that are associated with line collapse and
subsidence.
Go to the next slide, please.
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: This next diagram is a map showing you
the general location. The blue is the Kiskiminetas River,
which flows from the bottom of the slide up towards the top.
The black area is the general outline of the site. The
orange dot which is just to the upper left of that black
area is the active Parks Township operating facility and
29
across the river you see something labelled KVWPCA -- that
is the Kiski Valley Water Pollution Control Authority.
They unfortunately find themselves in possession
of a sewage lagoon that contains sewage ash with about 3
curies of enriched uranium in it.
This we believe came from the discharges that
occurred legally from the Apollo facility over the years.
Could I have the next diagram, please?
This is a blow-up of the area and the blackened
areas represent the trenches themselves.
You can see that on the northern part of the site
there is a dry run. It's an intermittent stream and then
there is a cluster of about nine trenches to the right and
one trench to the left.
Trench 1 is the trench that is outlined on the
aerial photograph that you have before you and I didn't show
all the trenches because it would get a rather busy picture.
In addition, there is Trench 10, which is down
closer to the operating facility.
The houses that I mentioned earlier are just to
the south of that road that is along the southern boundary
of the site.
Could I have the next slide, please?
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: Now as I mentioned, the waste that is
30
located in those trenches originated from the nearby Apollo
fuel processing plant and principally the wastes were
residues from uranium processing where various wastes have
been treated to remove the enriched uranium because the
uranium had value.
In addition to the uranium, which is in both
highly enriched and low enriched forms, there's naturally
occurring or natural enrichments of uranium, thorium
polychlorinated by phenols and various volatile organics, so
you can see that both we, the NRC, and the state,
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, have
interests in the successful remediation of the trenches.
The trench volume is about 600,000 cubic feet of
contaminated waste and soil, and in total we estimate about
anywhere up to 6 curies of uranium in the trenches.
There is some uncertainly and that is one of the
technical issues that I will get to later.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Quick question.
The PCBs and the organics, are they mixed in with
the other or are they separate as opposed to mixed waste --
MR. WEBER: Yes, as best we can tell, they are
intermingled.
Of course, the controls that were in place at the
time this waste was placed were a lot less than you will
find today at operating facilities.
31
Although this material has been there for several
decades, to date we have noticed no offsite contamination of
groundwater or surface water.
There has been some limited migration of both
radiological and chemical constituents but when I say
"limited" it's on the order of a few tens of feet from one
of the trenches, at least for the uranium.
The next slide, please.
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: The licensee in considering what
alternatives would be appropriate at the site identified
three principal alternatives.
One is disposal offsite. That is by far the
conventional decommissioning route where all the
contamination down to release levels is removed from the
site and taken off and disposed of at a licensed facility
that may be licensed to receive radiological waste or
chemical waste by EPA or a state or in some cases a state
agency that may have authorized both chemical and
radiological waste disposal, mixed waste disposal.
Another option that was considered was exhumation
of the waste, treatment of the waste and then disposal or
stabilization of the waste onsite -- so-called SOS option.
Then finally there is stabilization in place.
Stabilization in place is the licensee's preferred approach.
32
That is what the licensee has proposed in addition to
assessing these other alternatives.
Thus, they would stabilize the material where it
is in trenches by placing an engineered cover on top of it
and then constructing various engineered groundwater
barriers to provide long-term protection of the groundwater
immediately beneath the site.
These groundwater barriers could include, for
example, grout curtains, slurry walls, and hydraulic control
borings, all of which are intended to provide long-term
protection of the groundwater.
Of course, the questions with this arise how long
are these going to work, how effective will they be, and who
might be required to maintain them in perpetuity, as long as
the waste poses a hazard.
Thus another option or another provision in the
proposal is to institute some sort of long-term land use
restrictions and institutional controls to maintain these
barriers to provide protection.
The existing regulations, as we talked about
before, certainly point to unrestricted release as the
endpoint for decommissioning, and if the waste trenches were
disposed of or stabilized where they are, of course, that
would be a different end point. Thus, we initiated the
environmental impact statement to consider the alternatives
33
as well as the impacts.
Go to the next slide, please.
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: This background lays the discussion of
some of the key technical issues. We need to resolve these
issues as part of the development of the environmental
impact statement. We also need to resolve the issues in
actually authorizing the decommissioning, and that would
follow after the record of decision on the environmental
impact statement. One of the key technical issues is
potential reconcentration of the enrichment uranium into a
critical mass.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Is that real or hypothetical?
MR. WEBER: Well, that's what I'm going to get to.
There is sufficient mass inventory in the trenches to form a
critical mass and so what we're talking about here is the
potential long-term concern that somehow the uranium would
be soluabilized or leached from its waste form, transported
to some distance, and then reconcentrated through
precipitation or absorption into some form that would be a
critical geometry and thus, give rise to the uncontrolled
criticality.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: You have mentioned that this
had been around, some of this, for a while. Do you have a
good handle on what has prevented this kind of
34
reconcentration into a critical mass heretofore?
MR. WEBER: Time is one important factor. We
estimate that it would take tens of thousands of years, if
not longer, for this process to work in order to get
sufficient reconcentration.
We've conducted a thorough review of this amongst
the staff and we recently concluded that although it's
conceivable or possible that you could have a
reconcentration, the likelihood is extremely remote and
therefore, it doesn't deserve additional consideration as
part of the EIS development.
So we've satisfied ourselves that it's so remote,
so unlikely that it doesn't warrant additional review at
this time.
We will have to, at the time of licensing, again
revisit this in terms of a safety evaluation. That may
require additional review of this issue.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: When you do that safety
evaluation, do you intend to apply some kind of a risk-
based methodology not unlike what you might even be looking
at at a repository, for instance?
MR. WEBER: The dilemma that we have in these
kinds of assessments is getting a handle on the
probabilities. First of all, there's great uncertainties,
as you can well imagine.
35
The waste forms are heterogeneous, there's various
wastes in there. We'd have to estimate how likely are all
these different factors that would have to align themselves
in such a way that you would have sufficient
reconcentration.
That's our challenge. We're not thinking at this
time about a full-blown PRA-type approach, probablistic risk
analysis, but certainly, we will have to quantify, to some
extent, or use some qualitative basis to estimate what those
probabilities are.
That's what we've done to date in developing the
conclusions we've reached, but certainly we may have to take
that a step further in response to public comments, as well
as in our response to our need to satisfy ourselves in the
safety evaluation process.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: It strikes me that if you're
doing a safety evaluation, that's essentially what you are
doing, trying to get your hands around those probabilities.
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes.
MR. WEBER: Yes.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: How much HEU are you
talking about? Is that classified?
MR. WEBER: No, no, it's not classified; it's part
of the public record.
The next issue is source term characterization and
36
that's there for a key reason, because there is uncertainty
about how much HEU is there.
I believe the estimates that I had were anywhere
from one to three tons of enrichment uranium in the
trenches. So you have certainly enough, well enough, have a
critical mass, but the question is, when that is distributed
throughout 600,000-plus cubic feet of waste, when you have
to rely on various mechanisms to both dissolve and
reconcentrate the uranium and transport it and the right
geometries, it's a rather iffy proposition.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: It's iffy all around.
MR. WEBER: The third issue is groundwater
protection.
As I mentioned before, there is shallow
groundwater nearby; people use the groundwater to a certain
extent. There are nearby users and thus, we would seek and
the licensee and the community wants a high confidence that
if the waste were to be left in place, it would not pose an
unacceptable hazard to the groundwater.
If you rely on institution controls and you place
a suitable cover on top of the waste, groundwater becomes
one of the principal, if not the principal, pathways through
which human exposure could occur over the long term that
would be of concern at this site.
Therefore, we are closely evaluating the
37
licensee's technical demonstrations in terms of the
durability and the institutional controls, as well as the
engineered controls, that are designed to provide long-term
protection with the groundwater.
Could I have the next slide, please?
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: The near-term schedule for resolving
these issues is laid out on Slide 13. We are, I should
mention, cooperating fully with the Pennsylvania Department
of Environmental Protection.
We signed a memorandum of understanding with them
on the cooperation for remediation of all the SDMP and
related decommissioning sites within the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania this past summer.
They are an active participant in our review.
They are participating in our development of the
environmental impact statement and they have certain
interests with respect to not only the radiological
constituents, but also the chemical constituents.
We believe that a coordinated, government response
in this case makes the most sense and that is the reason why
we are cooperating so closely with them.
Our plan is to publish the draft environmental
impact statement in March of 1997. That is a slip from what
we had previously forecast, the reasons being we had some
38
delay in resolving this criticality issue.
We are also, as I mentioned, cooperating with the
State, just allow enough time to get our comments resolved
with our contractor, with the NRC staff, and with the
Commonwealth. That's pushed the schedule out to March of
1997.
We have, as Margaret mentioned earlier, initiated
some special public involvement activities at these three
sites. We have what we call a public information roundtable
which includes stakeholder representatives of all the
different interests in the vicinity of the sites.
We would allow a 90-day comment period on the
draft EIS and we intentionally schedule the public meeting
on that draft EIS well into that comment process, so that we
allow people time to read the document, become familiar with
what we're saying, ask questions, and then make their
comments known to us, but also give them some time after
that meeting to refine those comments or supplement those
comments as part of the public comment process.
We would hope to publish the final EIS early in
1998 and a review of the decommissioning plan would occur
shortly thereafter.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Will there be a
preferred alternative expressed in the EIA?
MR. WEBER: Yes, there will be. I think it's
39
NRC's practice to identify a preferred alternative. We did
so with the Shield alloy site. We concluded that there were
no obviously superior alternatives for that site, and I'll
get into that in a little bit.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: You hinted earlier that
one of the themes today is going to be institutional
control. Is institutional control of the site likely to be
the preferred or is that something that's --
MR. WEBER: That's the licensee's proposed
alternative or that's one of the components of the
licensee's proposed alternative, so that is one of the
issues we'll have to deal with as part of the EIS.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Is there any constraint?
You mentioned earlier that regulatory changes would be
needed to use institutional controls. Is that a constraint
on the EIS process or is that something that can work in
parallel?
MR. WEBER: I think it's something we are actively
resolving in parallel. We'd like to identify a number of
mechanisms that may be useful or valid to provide for the
long-term institutional controls necessary.
Our hope, as we move forward also in parallel with
the development of our final rulemaking on the residual
contamination criteria, is that we would be able to identify
some off-the-shelf, institutional controls that at least
40
could be used as a starting point for tailoring and applying
on these specific sites.
MS. FEDERLINE: Let me just add before Mike goes
on, as you've noted, we've addressed the technical issues
that relate to Parks Township. There are also policy and
regulatory issues that apply to this site, but because of
time, we opted to feature only one set of issues for each
site.
MR. WEBER: If I could have the next slide, we'll
turn to our next site which is the Sequoyah Fuels
Corporation site in Gore, Oklahoma.
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: We're using this site to illustrate
some of the regulatory issues that we face with some of the
more problematic SDMP sites.
This site is an 85-acre, industrial area on a 600-
acre site. It's located about 75 miles southeast of Tulsa,
Oklahoma, just outside of Gore.
This site, you may be familiar with, processed
uranium concentrate to produce uranium hexafluoride. They
also processed uranium tetrafluoride to convert back into a
more stable form.
The licensee is currently unable to provide
conventional financial assurance, which is one of the
regulatory issues that we typically face at this site. That
41
exacerbates the difficulty in finding a suitable remedy for
the contamination that is at this site.
I'll be describing how much contamination is there
and what the likely remedies are going to be, at least as
proposed by the licensee.
To illustrate this, if you take the existing
volume of waste that's at that site and multiply by
conventional waste disposal fees, the cost to remediate the
site for waste disposal alone, for off-site disposal, ranges
anywhere from hundreds of millions of dollars to upwards of
a billion dollars or more. When we're dealing with a
licensee that has limited financial assets, that certainly
makes this something of a problem.
The licensee is also required to remediate the
site in accordance with an Environmental Protection Agency-
issued order for hazardous waste under the Resource
Conservation Recovery Act Program. So we are cooperating
closely with EPA.
Like Parks Township and Pennsylvania site, we have
a site-specific MOU here for the Sequoyah Fuels facility.
That was signed a couple of years ago and we're actively
implementing that to ensure that we provide a coordinated
government response to the site.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Let me ask a question about
that.
42
This remediation under EPA, does that require
removal of the hazardous waste or simply stabilization,
since we're looking at maybe on-site disposal here as well?
MR. WEBER: Much like our program, EPA is on the
front end of those decisions and so they are leaving open to
various different options. They are going through a phase
process, so they've recently completed site characterization
and a little bit later on, I'll get to the specific next
steps. You can see that we're moving through the process in
tandem.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: It might be fair to say that
some decisions or is it fair to say, let me put it in the
form of a question, that some decisions we might make
regarding this site would be influenced by what EPA does?
For example, if EPA decides that the waste needs
to be removed, will that influence our decision and vice
versa?
MR. WEBER: Certainly, it could. That's one of
the reasons why we cooperate with them. One of our concerns
is, frankly, if that is required, what impact would that
have on the licensee's ability to remedy the rest of the
site.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Exactly.
MR. WEBER: So both EPA and NRC recognize that
we're dealing with a finite pot of resources and we need to
43
cooperate to ensure that's used in the most protected way
for the public.
MS. FEDERLINE: One of the important things here
is that we develop our environmental impact statement in the
same time frame that EPA is developing its documents as
well. That way, we get a time sequencing approach. If
either agency raises a problem, we'll know about it in a
time frame that we can do something about it.
MR. WEBER: Unlike our process, they are not
constrained to an EIS development, so to some extent, they
are a little bit lighter than we are in terms of moving
forward, so we've got to really do our best effort to keep
in parallel with them.
MR. REITER: Just on this question of resources,
how far can NRC reach within the corporate structure that
Seqouyah Fuels --
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: The Commission can't discuss
the --
MS. CYR: That is the subject of an ongoing
litigation. The Commission staff issued an order and
various pieces of it are pending currently before the
Commission and boards.
MR. WEBER: Could I have Slide 15, please.
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: I mentioned earlier I'd give you some
44
estimates of extent of contamination at the site. There's
about more than 7 million cubic feet of radioactive waste at
the site in the form of building soil, contaminated
equipment.
There were also, much like the Parks Township
site, former burials under 20.304 of our regulations, and
the contamination here, unlike Parks Township, is not
enriched, it's natural isotopic ratios for the uranium.
There is some radium also at the site as bleed
through as part of the uranium hexafluoride process.
Approximately 9 million gallons of raffinate sludge still
exists in the ponds at the site from a solvent extraction
process and there you have uranium, radium and various
chemical contamination. Those ponds contain about 35 curies
of uranium.
All told, there's at least 122 curies of uranium
at the site and the licensee estimates that's in excess of
181 metric tons of uranium. There's additional uranium that
is still in the facility itself and so you're probably
looking at something on the order of 200 or so tons of
uranium at that site.
There's also significant uranium groundwater
contamination and contamination of the groundwater by
nitrate and arsenic. That's one of the things that EPA is
concerned about. There is some migration of that
45
contamination.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: How stabilized is this site?
MR. WEBER: It is under the control of the
licensee. There is a fence around it, but the contamination
continues to migrate in the groundwater.
One thing that works for the licensee is there are
no near distance users of the groundwater. As best we can
tell, the groundwater is migrating in the direction of the
Arkansas River and thus --
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Yes, we've had the sample at
the request of the Governor's office in the past. It is
then off-site, the groundwater plume?
MR. WEBER: There is some off-site contamination.
Could I have the next slide, please?
[Slide.]
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Go back for a second.
MR. WEBER: Okay.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Technically, this is more
difficult than the previous example?
MR. WEBER: There are technical challenges. This
does not have the criticality concern that we have at Parks
Township, but you have similar technical challenges in terms
of characterizing heterogeneous wastes that were disposed
of, figuring out what to do with the wastes, what are
practical remedies for the contamination at the site, so
46
there are technical challenges.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: So at this point, the
contamination is not really stabilized in the sense of
preventing further off-site migration?
MR. WEBER: Correct. Some of the contamination,
the old burial sites, have covers on them, but some of the
contamination sits there in open impoundments and has not
been stabilized.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay.
MR. WEBER: This next diagram is a site map and
I've illustrated in orange there, the areas where the
principal contamination exists. You can see the --
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: You see a lot of it.
MR. WEBER: Yes, there is a lot of orange. If you
look at the main access road off Highway 10 coming in on the
righthand side of the diagram, there's a little road up
beyond the guard house. The processing facility is right
there on the top end of that road where most of the
processing occurred.
Much of the rest of the site consists of the ponds
with the raffinate slude, the old burial areas, storage
cells, runoff from when they had the 1986 accident, there's
a plume that transported to the southeast from the accident
back in 1986, and so on.
You can see there is a lot of surface
47
contamination. The buildings are contaminated. It is a
challenge to decommission this facility.
Can I have the next slide, please?
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: For the decommissioning, the licensee
has at least conceptually proposed that an approach similar
to that taken for uranium mill tailings be pursued where a
design would be developed for a more or less conventional
uranium mill tailings cover. The contaminated soil,
building rubble, et cetera, would be consolidated into an
on-site disposal cell. The rest of the site would be
released for industrial use, which is of great concern to
the local residents that it be used -- some residents prefer
that it be used in a productive way. Other residents are
concerned that the contamination be removed entirely from
the site.
And then if an on-site cell is used for the
stabilization of the contamination, some sort of long-term
controls, again, would be appropriate to ensure that the
barriers are suitably maintained, the site is monitored and
so forth to ensure that people do not dig into the waste and
become exposed to the contamination. So, again, here we
have an institutional control issue.
Some of the key regulatory issues are depicted on
the next slide. One, I have already mentioned and that is
48
the financial weakness of the licensee. Our challenge and
the licensee's challenge is to find a safe and protective
solution within the capabilities of the licensee. This may
prompt imposition of interim measures. For example, you
brought up, Madam Chairman, about stabilizing the waste for
some interim period. That may be appropriate and necessary,
especially if we see that decommissioning might drag on. It
may be better to stabilize the waste in some interim form so
that we don't have as great long-term concerns as we
otherwise would have.
We have already talked about the need to
coordinate with the EPA in the coordination of the schedule.
Our desire is that there be a coordinated response to make
sure both agencies are satisfied that whatever remedies are
selected are going to be protective of the public and the
environment.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Mike, is the EPA's cleanup
schedule as aggressive as ours?
MR. WEBER: I believe so. In fact, I believe
theirs might be more aggressive than ours in terms of -- I
mentioned earlier, they don't have the environmental impact
statement process to go through, which allows them to
streamline their reviews a little bit more than ours.
And then, lastly, the institutional control issue,
what controls may be necessary to provide for the long-term
49
protection of the public and the environment. That raises
associated issues of how durable these controls are, how
effective they will be in protecting the public and who is
going to carry them out. Should it be the federal
government, the state government, the Cherokee Nation, some
private firm, rely on land use controls, deed restrictions
and so forth.
Schedule of activities on the next slide, Slide
19, we have recently commenced the environmental impact
statement analyses to lead ultimately to the development of
the draft EIS. We are further behind here because we
recently completed the scoping back in May and we are
preparing the scoping summary report, both the public
comments that we received as well as the participation from
the various cooperating agencies and we have reviewed the
site characterization report submitted by the licensee this
past spring and summer and provided comments. Similarly,
EPA had the licensee prepare a site characterization report
and has been doing a review of that information.
I list here, in response to Commissioner Dicus's
question, the corrective measure study that is being
conducted by the licensee is due to EPA, I believe, it's now
in three months or four months after the remedial facility
investigation is accepted. That is a document that looks at
what alternatives are available to remedy the contamination
50
at the site. So, much like our process, EPA will then go
through a process of evaluating what various alternatives
exist and how likely they are going to be in succeeding in
stabilizing the contamination, protecting the environment.
Based on our understanding of their schedule, that
would be due sometime the first quarter of 1997 and you can
see that our draft EIS should be out in the fall of 1997, so
there is a little bit of a lag there but we are doing what
we can to keep abreast of their schedule so we can
accomplish this coordinated response to the licensee.
May I have the next slide, please?
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: The last site that I will focus on is
the Shieldalloy Metallurgical Corporation site which is
located in Cambridge, Ohio. This is illustrative of some of
the policy issues.
Again, as Margaret pointed out, we have policy,
technical and regulatory issues at all three of these sites
but we are focusing in on the specific sets of issues to
illustrate them. This site is on about 130 acres, it is 70
miles east of Columbus and it is in between Cambridge, Ohio,
and Byesville, Ohio, on Route 209.
Unlike the previous two facilities, this facility
was never in what you might call a conventional nuclear
business. The contamination that they have on site arose
51
from the processing of metal, feedstock materials, ores and
chemicals and the contamination that came along for the
ride, the uranium and thorium contamination, was there in
trace quantities but they found themselves in sufficient
quantities to require a license from the Atomic Energy
Commission and, more recently, from the NRC.
The licensee is currently in Chapter 11 bankruptcy
and has been going through a detailed and extensive
reorganization planning process. They initiated bankruptcy
back in 1993 and are still responding to the Bankruptcy
Court on schedules for developing the reorganization plan.
One of the principal environmental liabilities
that they have to deal with as part of that reorganization
is the decommissioning of this site in Cambridge, Ohio, as
well as their sister facility in Newfield, New Jersey. And
I believe the Commission recently received a SECY paper on
the Newfield site because there are some licensing issues
that are also involved in that case.
Could I have the next slide, please?
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: Much like the Sequoyah Fuels facility,
there is a large volume of contamination at the site, seven
million cubic feet of contaminated slag and sediment that
currently is stockpiled in two piles on site. If you want
to envision that volume, that is about a football field
52
stacked 160 feet deep of waste, so it is a fairly large
area. Although, I must admit, when you go to see the site,
it doesn't look as large as the volume would speak to.
At this site, there are elevated concentrations of
natural uranium and thorium in the slag and, of course,
their associated decay products. There are also anomalous
concentrations of various decay products including thorium
230, protactinium 231 and actinium 227. It is unclear why
these concentrations are elevated but the best we can tell
is perhaps the site at some point in its past processed
uranium or, I should say, processed sidestream chemicals
that were sidestreamed from a uranium processing facility.
And it may be that some of the decay products bled through
the uranium processing stream into the vanadium
concentrates, for example, that may be at the site.
This issue came to our attention through a
response to allegations. An individual alleged that there
was off-site contamination beneath his home. We initiated
an initial response and ultimately we discovered that there
were several tens of properties, off-site properties, that
contained elevated levels of natural or of radioactive
materials in slag that may have been removed from the site
over the years to be used as construction backfill. So that
is another related issue that we have to deal with at this
site.
53
There is also slag and sediment that contain
elevated levels of metal constituents including vanadium.
For example, there is some vanadium contamination in the
wetlands immediately adjacent to the west pile.
Much like Pennsylvania and the Oklahoma
facilities, we are cooperating with the state of Ohio, both
the Ohio Department of Health, Ohio Environmental Protection
Administration and the Attorney General's Office in
resolving some of these issues.
May I have the next slide, please?
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: You have seen this map before in our
briefing earlier this spring. We used the Shieldalloy site
to illustrate how we were applying some of our performance
assessment techniques in the decommissioning program. This
was the one site that was discussed. In the middle there,
on the map, you can see the orange area, those are the two
piles. The so-called west pile, which has a cover on it,
and then the east pile which presently is not covered. The
processing facility is in between those two piles and I
depict there in blue Chapman Run which is a stream that
flows from the south to the north and ultimately discharges
into Wills Creek, which is the water supply for Cambridge.
Could I have the next slide, please?
[Slide.]
54
MR. WEBER: The licensee's proposal at this site
is to stabilize the contamination on site, to leave it
pretty much where it is and place a cap on the two piles
and, once again, some type of long-term institution control
will be necessary or would be necessary to provide
protection to the public and the environment. However,
unlike the previous two facilities, Shieldalloy wants to
continue to conduct their line of business at their present
site. Now, I should point out that they ceased processing
licensed radioactive material at the site in 1972 so the
present owner, Shieldalloy, really never processed uranium
or thorium at the site, even in the trace quantities that
originally led to the slag that is on site. They acquired
that when they purchased the property back in 1987. So they
have not been doing licensed activity.
Nevertheless, they still have an active NRC
license and I should point out, I think, our recent update
on the SDMP, there is a field in the site review, the
attachment to the SECY paper, where we list the license as
expired. That's in error. The license is active and we
continue to maintain that.
The next slide, please.
[Slide.]
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: If you are looking at long-
term institutional controls, as you go about doing your
55
analyses or you require certain submissions from the
licensees, are costs of the particular long-term control
scenarios factored in?
MR. WEBER: Yes.
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes, they are, in the
environmental impact statement.
MR. WEBER: Now, our ability to quantify those
costs is, of course, a function of what option will
ultimately be selected.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Right.
MR. WEBER: But we have been looking at ranges of
costs as far as the different alternatives and clearly any
approval of the decommissioning plan which would ultimately
lead to the final resolution of the site would have to
include some sort of provisions for financial assurance if
needed and, as we will see a little bit later in terms of
transfer to DOE, there are certain financial aspects that
have to be addressed.
The next chart, Chart 24, highlights several
issues in assessing the long-term impacts. These are issues
that are technically driven but have policy implications.
First, I want to point out that these dose
estimates that are on here are based on what we believe are
conservative calculations and I have to say that at the
outset. We did have our public meeting on the environmental
56
impact statement, we had comments on the one side saying you
can't believe what NRC is saying in the environmental impact
statement and then, on the other side, the licensee was
concerned that perhaps we had overestimated the impacts and
thus made the situation look worse than it really was.
We have done that in light of some of the
uncertainties that we presently have with the data at the
site. Those conservative estimates are driven in two ways.
One, in terms of the scenario that we assume in doing the
calculation and, by scenario, I refer to what assumptions do
we make in terms of how someone might be exposed to the
contamination. You will see three different scenarios
there, scenarios A, B and C.
Scenario A is largely an industrial scenario.
What kind of exposures would you expect if somebody used
that site for 2,000 hours a year in an occupational setting.
They weren't growing crops, they weren't drinking the
groundwater, et cetera. Primarily, they were being exposed
through the direct gamma exposure route.
Versus scenario C, which is a resident farmer
scenario. This is typically what we have used in developing
our decommissioning criteria. It is what EPA often uses in
looking at the cleanup of some of the contaminated sites
under the Superfund program. Not the disposal of the waste
but the cleanup, where you are going to release the site for
57
unrestricted release.
You can see there quite a dramatic impact in terms
of what scenarios are assumed. For example, if you take
stabilization in place, scenario A would be estimated to
give a dose of about 8 millirem per year versus scenario C
would be about 464 millirem per year. The contamination is
the same; it is just we have changed the way in which we
have assumed someone is going to be exposed to the
contamination.
The conservatisms are also driven by the parameter
values that we select. For example, in the leach rate for
the slag, how much of the radioactive material will leach,
at what rate and how quickly will that be transported in the
groundwater beneath the site? And that drives the dose
estimates that you see in this chart.
The third thing I would point out is that the
maximum dose, without controls, as you can see in the
improved cover column, is 30 millirem for stabilization in
place, which is desirable because, of course, that's less
than our public dose limit in Part 20 of 100 millirem per
year. Thus, it is apparent that if the scenarios we assumed
are appropriate, that you may not need the kind of long-
term institutional controls you may need at other sites, for
example at the Parks Township site where you have sufficient
inventories of enriched uranium in the trenches. It is
58
something that we have to carefully weigh, of course,
because if you use a slightly more conservative scenario,
the doses will be driven up.
This is principally driven by the assumption that
no one is going to live and grow crops and drink groundwater
immediately out of the east pile because it is a small area
and because of the rocklike nature of the slag.
If somebody were to dig a garden there that they
would quickly realize that this is not the best place to
grow your vegetables.
The fourth point is that the offsite dose is
limited.
It's six millirem, based on the calculations that
we have done in the environmental impact statement, so you
can see in all cases whether any action is taken or the site
stabilized in place the dose would be below 10 millirem per
year.
Finally, in the far-right column you see the cost
estimates ranging anywhere over three orders of magnitude
from about $.3 million to in excess of $100 million -- so
depending on what option is selected, it has significant
impacts on the costs of decommissioning.
This sets us up for discussion of some of the key
policy issues on Slide 25. I mentioned the scenarios that
we have assumed and how the conclusions that are drawn are
59
driven in some part by the scenarios.
The doses to the public based on the scenarios
that we used in the draft EIS are expected to be below 10
millirem per year with the application of effective
institutional controls, and that is desirable because it is
a small fraction of our public dose limit in Part 20.
Without those controls we still believe the doses would be
below the public dose of 100 millirem per year because of
the reasons that I previously cited.
We have assumed minimal intrusion into the pile
due to the nature of the slag.
The calculated doses, as I pointed out earlier,
are believed to be conservative and thus if you took a more
realistic view of how someone might be exposed or what some
of the parameters are and how they might drive those dose
estimates, you could find reduced doses.
So just to summarize that slide, we have the
policy issues associates with what scenario is assumed, how
conservative should we be in doing those calculations, and
again the questions of institutional controls, how durable
are they, how effective, and who should do them.
Schedule of activities -- we are a little bit
further along on the shieldalloy site.
On Slide 26 you can see we have published our
draft EIS in July and we have already begun receiving
60
comments on that draft EIS.
We had a public meeting on September 16th in
Cambridge, Ohio. We had about 100 people turn out for the
public meeting including state and local representatives,
elected officials, and some Congressional staff members, the
licensee of course and other interested members of the
public, so there was a wide variety of people who
participated.
We had media coverage as well.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: How do you make use of the
results of the public meeting?
MR. WEBER: We transcribed the meeting. All the
comments that come in have to be evaluated in terms of
finalizing our EIS.
We are already aware that an individual has
proposed an alternative that was not considered, so we have
committed that we would consider that in the final
environmental impact statement to see if that is an
obviously superior alternative -- as an example.
But we are obligated to respond to the comments
that we receive as part of the finalization of the EIS and
we often find that those comments are useful because they
may point out information that we did not have access to or
in this case an alternative that perhaps we didn't
specifically identify.
61
We would expect to publish the final EIS in August
of next year, August of 1997, and again the decommissioning
plan would follow shortly thereafter.
On Slide 27, if we could summarize what we have
seen so far, some of these issues are unique to each site.
As an example of that we have the potential
reconcentration into a critical mass at the Parks Township
facility.
But there are certainly common issues and they
include what exposure scenario should be assumed, how
conservative should the calculations be, what is
appropriate, how can we be sufficiently protective and yet
not go overboard in being unrealistic, how durable are
institutional controls, who would do them, how effective
might they be and how long can they be assumed to last.
Closely linked to that then is Government custody.
One mechanism to provide for long-term control
might be state or federal ownership, very similar to what is
already in place for the uranium mill tailings program where
the Department of Energy is responsible for the long-term
custody of tailings disposal facilities, and then the cost
effectiveness of the remedies -- the age-old question since
we are operating in many cases below the public dose limit,
below the adequate protection threshold, what role does cost
have to bear in our considerations of the various
62
alternatives.
As we pointed out earlier, there is significant
public and some Congressional interest in these sites. For
that reason, we initiated these public information
roundtables, and we have been engaging the public or at
least trying to throughout this process so that they are
aware of the issues and they participate actively in the
identification of those issues.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Let me ask you a question
about that.
On the onsite disposal option, you mentioned, I
think you mentioned earlier some people are for it, some
people are against it from the public's perspective, but is
there a trend, do you get a feel that it's generally going
to be acceptable to the public or --
MR. WEBER: Well, since we have our EIS out for
public comment now, I would be a little reluctant bit to
forecast how it's going to come out.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: But you have had the public
meeting for example.
MR. WEBER: We heard comments both for and
against.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: How about -- then let me go
on to another question real quick.
The coordination with the compacts that these
63
sites are in, I assume that's occurring. I assume they are
participating in the comments.
Again, I guess that is an ongoing issue?
MR. WEBER: Yes, it is an ongoing issue. So far I
am not aware that we have received comments from the
compacts. We do coordinate with them but I think to a large
measure in most cases the facilities that are under
development were not contemplated to take these kinds of
wastes.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: That's right.
MR. WEBER: So we often get the impression, it may
be my informal understanding that they are just as happy if
we can find a way to take care of this waste and not have it
go to their disposal facilities.
For example, in some of the states the design
capacity is less than the amount of these sites, and those
facilities are intended to operate for 20 years or so.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Mr. Taylor, you had a comment?
MR. TAYLOR: No, I was agreeing. A lot of waste
here.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Have we terminated a site
using onsite disposal yet?
MR. WEBER: Yes. We found it acceptable to leave
onsite disposals behind at other sites.
We have approved a decommissioning plan for the
64
Chemetron Harvard Avenue site. We have approved a
decommissioning plan for the BP Chemicals site. Both of
them are in Ohio. We have not terminated their licenses
because they are in the process of performing the
decommissioning but there have been sites where we have
terminated the licenses with onsite disposals.
In other cases we have terminated the license way
in the past and now we have gone back to revisit it and
decided it's okay to leave that contamination behind.
If I could have the next slide.
[Slide.]
MR. WEBER: In addressing the question that the
Chairman put to us at the beginning about institutional
controls, Staff is pursuing this common issue on
institutional controls. We are doing it both generically as
well as on a site specific basis.
There are several different types of controls that
may be effective at these sites.
One of them may be Government custody.
There may also be the other mechanisms that were
identified as part of the proposed rule on the
decommissioning criteria. For example, I believe as part of
the rulemaking package we specifically laid out different
alternative mechanisms that might be effective.
Again, you would have to tailor those controls for
65
the amount of contamination and the risk that is posed by
that material.
For some very limited risk situations it might be
prudent to use some sort of zoning restriction or commitment
from the licensee if the licensee is going to be in place
for some time.
In other cases where you have extensive
contamination you have concerns about the long-term
durability of the responsible party, Government custody
might be the preferred way to go. Sites such as these we
have already seen are going to be decommissioned. Some may
be decommissioned with land use restrictions and so some
sort of long-term care may be needed to ensure protection of
the public.
To date, the states that we have interacted with
have not expressed a desire to take over long-term
responsibility for these sites. That doesn't mean that they
have ruled it out, but they have been encouraging us to find
other remedies.
One of the remedies that we have been pursuing is
under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 we believe that
authority already exists for the Department of Energy to
take site where low level waste has been disposed of
provided that NRC makes certain findings including that our
requirements are satisfied, that the transfer of the site to
66
the federal government would be at no cost to the federal
government, and finally a determination that would have to
be made is that federal ownership is in fact necessary and
desirable to ensure long-term protection of the public.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: This no cost to the federal
government provision, is that no cost for the transfer of
the custody or through the life of the custody?
MR. WEBER: I think we viewed it more as through
the life of the custody, that we shouldn't be transferring a
burden to the federal government.
If we anticipate that periodic maintenance would
be needed or monitoring, that ought to be built into the
transfer, so that perhaps --
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay, so some fund or some
financial provisions.
MR. WEBER: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Because I was going to say you
can't guarantee no costs going forward, right?
MR. WEBER: Right.
MR. PAPERIELLO: I believe we do something like
that when we transfer mill tailing sites.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Yes, we do.
MR. PAPERIELLO: Because there is a fund put aside
for it.
MR. WEBER: And we did that for the transfer of
67
the AMAX site under Section 151(c) of the Nuclear Waste
Policy Act, but you have hit on a concern that DOE has
expressed to us, and that is this question of, well, at
whose expense would the long-term maintenance and control
be?
We are discussing this with DOE. Their principal
concerns in addition to the financial risk include technical
adequacy.
They would like to be participating with us as we
go forward, so there are no surprises when we knock on their
door and say here's the site, please take it.
There are regulatory uncertainties.
For example, we may find that remediation in the
decommissioning has been performed in an acceptable manner
and we are willing to terminate the license. DOE is
concerned about the long-term risk that at some point in the
future a state or some other regulatory entity would come
knocking on their door saying, oh, by the way, you now have
this contamination -- we expect you to do something other
than what NRC originally found acceptable.
We are working with them to try to get a common
grasp of these issues and identify feasible means to control
or contain those issues.
The fourth --
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Do you contemplate perhaps
68
working out some kind of MOU with DOE to, you know, work out
a consistent methodology for approaching these issues?
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes.
MR. WEBER: Yes. In fact, when we met with them
this past summer, that was one of the proposals that we
made, that we would work on some sort of agreement or MOU or
something that would lay out up front what the common
expectations are, what the roles and responsibilities are
and we believe that would also go a long way in terms of
laying out some ready-made solution for this limited number
of sites that may be out there that would require some sort
of government custody.
We plan to continue progress, on Slide 30, with
the development of the site-specific EISs and through this
developmental process, evaluate the feasibility of the
generic environmental impact statements. As I mentioned
before, we wanted to get several of these under our belt
before we decided was it feasible. Our technical people and
the regulators will be involved in scoping out what are the
pros and cons. We will be working with the general
counsel's office in assessing the legal viability of this
approach.
But, as we stated in SECY 95-209, we believe that
there may be some long-term payback here in terms of
improved efficiency as well as some improved predictability
69
if we could address this through a generic process. And, as
I do believe Margaret previously pointed out, we may also
then use the generic EIS as a basis for going back and
making regulatory changes to codify that right into our base
requirements.
We will encourage and continue to encourage timely
decommissioning under the existing criteria. The timeliness
rule is a big driver in that area because it does apply to
these sites. As you saw on the chart that we showed
earlier, we are making progress. We are slightly ahead of
where we expected to be at this time and, certainly by next
May, which that chart is intended to cover, we hope to have
met all of our goals if not exceeded them.
We will follow the SDMP action plan, as the
Commission previously directed, to implement the program.
We are also working -- we haven't talked about it in this
briefing but, of course, we are working closely with our
Office of Research, General Counsel's Office and the other
program offices on the radiological criteria rulemaking. We
believe that is still desirable because it would enhance the
efficiency, consistency and predictability of the program
giving licensees a defined end point for their
decommissioning programs.
And then, as I mentioned, we are in the process of
discussing with DOE on this long-term agreement or mechanism
70
to provide for government custody of sites should we find
that to be necessary to provide protection.
Thank you.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Taylor.
Commissioner Dicus, Commissioner McGaffigan,
Commissioner Rogers?
COMMISSIONER DICUS: One more quick question.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Go ahead.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: One final question.
The statistical methods that have been use or that
we are using to provide a confidence that the site has been
accurately and adequately cleaned up, has had some soundness
problems and I understand we are working on that. Do we
have confidence that we have got it where we need it to be?
MS. FEDERLINE: We are working with three other
federal agencies to develop the multiagency site
investigation manual which would provide consistent guidance
across the federal government for decommissioning activities
for termination surveys specifically.
MR. WEBER: We are confident that 5849 provides
us, NUREG CR-5849 provides us with an adequate technical
basis. The problem is that there are some criterion there
that licensees find problematic and when we have evaluated,
there really are better ways to go and that is why we have
71
been developing this MARSSIM manual that Margaret referred
to.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Thank you.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: Just on that, how is that
going? The SECY said it should be completed in late 1996.
Do you still expect that?
MR. WEBER: It is either late this year or early
next year.
We did recently this summer complete an internal
review of the document and the committee, the interagency
committee, is looking at the comments and trying to resolve
them and to prepare the document in a form that is suitable
for release.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: I know last year, I think,
when you reported to us in SECY 95-209 and you described the
virtues of that, it looked like it could be extremely
useful. Do you still feel that it has that great promise?
MS. FEDERLINE: Yes. We think it will provide the
technical basis. We think that there will probably be the
need for an overlay document to provide some simplified
discussion but we think that it will provide the overall
technical basis that will allow us to move forward.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner McGaffigan? No?
Before I close, since we do have the project
managers here, again, these are kind of major headache kinds
72
of sites, is there anything that we have missed or any
particularly thorny issues from your perspectives that we
need to keep in the back of our minds that we haven't
already heard about?
No? Well, thank you.
The Commission would like to thank the staff for a
very informative briefing on the SDMP program. In the
paper, you described a number of successes over the past
year, including the moving of sites off the SDMP, as we have
discussed, approving decommissioning plans, issuing
inspection guidance and implementing the streamlined
decommissioning approval approach that is described -- that
was described to the Commission last year. And, in fact, I
would like to compliment you on your diligent efforts
because these do represent improvement since the last time
we were briefed.
But, as you pointed out a number of issues
involving policy decisions do remain. As you just said,
DOE's role in long-term institutional controls is unresolved
but, in some sense, it seems few alternatives exist if DOE
does not take custody. And some sites remain on the SDMP
which are many years away from even starting decommissioning
and a number of them, as you pointed out, have inadequate
decommissioning funding. So there is obviously room for
progress in these areas.
73
The Commission will be considering these issues
and the policy issues as they are brought forth but the
overall direction of NRC's materials decommissioning program
under the strategic assessment and rebaselining. Again,
this is for public consumption, the Commission looks forward
to stakeholder input in the weeks ahead before we track down
to our ultimate decisionmaking.
So, unless my fellow commissioners have anything
to add, we stand adjourned. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 3:38 p.m., the briefing was
concluded.]
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