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Home > Electronic Reading Room > Document Collections > Commission Documents > Commission Meetings, Slides, Transcripts, Meeting SRMs, and Full Written Explanation for Closed Meetings > 1997
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03/31/1997
1
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
- - -
MEETING WITH DOE ON EXTERNAL
REGULATION OF DOE FACILITIES
- - -
PUBLIC MEETING
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
One White Flint North
Rockville, Maryland
Monday, March 31, 1997
The Commission met in open session, pursuant to
notice, at 2:30 p.m., Shirley A. Jackson, Chairman,
presiding.
COMMISSIONERS PRESENT:
SHIRLEY A. JACKSON, Chairman of the Commission
KENNETH C. ROGERS, Commissioner
GRETA J. DICUS, Commissioner
NILS J. DIAZ, Commissioner
EDWARD McGAFFIGAN, JR., Commissioner
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STAFF AND PRESENTERS SEATED AT THE COMMISSION TABLE:
JOHN C. HOYLE, Secretary of the Commission
KAREN D. CYR, General Counsel
THOMAS GRUMBLY, Under Secretary, DOE
RAY BERUBE, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment
RAY PELLETIER, Director, Office of Environmental Policy
and Assistance
MARY ANNE SULLIVAN, Deputy General Counsel for
Environment and Civilian and Defense Nuclear Programs
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P R O C E E D I N G S
[2:30 p.m.]
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Good afternoon, ladies and
gentlemen.
Today, the Commission will be briefed by officials
of the U.S. Department of Energy on its proposal to have its
nuclear activities to be regulated externally by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. The Department made an announcement
on December 20 of 1996 that it intended to submit
legislation to the Congress to transfer oversight of nuclear
safety to the NRC. The DOE announcement was made after the
completion of a study by an independent advisory committee
and a follow-up study by a DOE working group on external
regulation.
The Commission considered the matter of NRC's
oversight of DOE nuclear safety as part of its strategic
assessment and rebaselining initiative. Public comment was
solicited on the issue and the public strongly encouraged
the Commission to pursue the external regulation of DOE
nuclear safety.
The DOE's working group recommendation that NRC be
given regulatory oversight of DOE nuclear facilities, along
with the strong public support that NRC should have that
oversight responsibility, influenced the Commission's final
decision, which was issued just this last Friday on this
. 4
matter and should be available here.
Following the release of the Commission's final
decision on Friday, March 28, I did have the opportunity to
speak with Secretary Pena. At that time, he had not been
briefed on the subject but felt that there was a lot of
forward momentum for this proposal as well as Administration
support. Both the Secretary and I agreed that we will be in
contact very shortly. In fact, we will meet to discuss the
next steps in this initiative.
The Commission endorses NRC's taking
responsibility for the regulatory oversight of certain DOE
nuclear facilities. The Commission has directed the NRC
staff to establish a task force to identify the policy and
regulatory and legislative issues that need to be resolved
for this initiative to be successful. The Commission has
also instructed the staff to develop a join memorandum of
understanding with the Department of Energy to establish the
framework for the legislative and follow-on phases of the
project and I, myself, will be writing a letter to the
Secretary, which I indicated to him in our discussion,
laying out the Commission's endorsement and basic position
in these matters, as well as some specifics as to how we
might go forward.
Many administrative, technical and legal issues
will have to be resolved if NRC is to carry out the
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Department's proposal. Today's briefing will be a first
step in gaining a better understanding of the issues as DOE
sees them that need to be resolved between the two agencies
if the proposal moves forward. We are looking forward to
hearing more details about the DOE proposal.
If none of my fellow commissioners have any
comments, Mr. Grumbly, would you please proceed? And it's
good to see you.
MR. GRUMBLY: Nice to see you, Madam Chairman.
And I would like to express appreciation to you and to the
rest of the Commission for the opportunity to meet this
afternoon to talk about this particular proposal.
I am pleased to be able to announce that
subsequent to the phone call that you had with Secretary
Pena that we were able to brief him last Friday and that we
came away from the briefing with his general support for the
concept of NRC regulation of DOE. He encouraged additional
efforts between DOE and NRC to further define the scope,
time frame and other elements required for a smooth
transition to NRC regulation but I wanted to emphasize his
continued support of the Administration's position in this
area.
We acknowledge receipt of the Commission's March
28, 1997, memorandum on this matter. We welcome, obviously,
the Commission's endorsement. We understand and agree with
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the conditions that were set forth by the Commission in that
memorandum and we look forward to working with the NRC task
force being created by the Commission to resolve many of the
policy, legal and technical issues in this very ambitious
but, I think, right proposal to improve the credibility and
safety of our activities.
I believe each of you has a briefing in front of
you with some briefing charts that I am going to use. That
and hopefully this will not take too long and we will have
plenty of opportunity to respond to questions. Let me just
say it is quite odd to look up and see my own picture.
[Laughter.]
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: That's the way we do things
around here.
MR. GRUMBLY: What we are going to cover here
today is a little bit about the current regulatory
framework, the historical context, some of the key
considerations that went into our views as we put this
proposal together. The specific NRC phased regulation
proposal, how we see this happening in a context of
regulated facilities in the DOE becoming many fewer over the
next five to ten years, talk a little bit about our
perspective of the annual cost to NRC, summarize the
benefits of external regulations as we see them, lay out a
future schedule and then talk about the legislation that we
. 7
see happening.
I think you and probably most of the people in
this room understand that DOE has changed dramatically in
the last 10 years, that operating from what was just about
10 years ago or the end of 1986, from an environment in
which we were totally self-regulated, we have changed rather
dramatically over the last decade.
In the environmental area, we are almost entirely
externally regulated at the moment by a combination of the
United States Environmental Protection Agency, state and
state regulatory agencies. In the worker protection area,
we are still currently self-regulated although we have a
proposal that has just come from the National Academy of
Public Administration that reinforces a decision that
Secretary O'Leary made early in her administration and that
is that we ought to work together with the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration there.
And in the nuclear safety arena, we are still
self-regulated with some exceptions. For example, as you
know, the geologic repository is currently regulated by NRC,
lucky you.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Noted.
MR. GRUMBLY: But I think, you know, the main
thing to understand is that we have been slowly but surely
emerging from the cocoon of self-regulation over the last
. 8
several years. What we did not mention here, obviously, is
that in 1989 the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was
established to actually oversee but not regulate many of
DOE's defense nuclear facilities. That establishment
happened at a time when the Cold War was still under way and
we believe that the world has continued to change over the
last seven or eight years and that it's appropriate now to
begin moving in a different direction.
The historical context for this, you summarized a
little bit, Madam Chairman, in your opening remarks, but
just so that we get it all on the record, beginning in March
of '94, there were some initial congressional proposals
initially put forward by Congressman George Miller from the
state of California, who was then chair of the House Natural
Resources Committee, that would have resulted in external
regulation of DOE nuclear facilities.
At that time, the Administration and the Secretary
responded with a counterproposal saying that we would like
to put together an advisory committee in the department to
take perhaps a less fevered look at this issue than
sometimes can be given by the Congress. So we put together
an advisory committee that was headed by former NRC Acting
Chairman John Ahearn. And people, with people from around
really the nuclear complex including Joe DiNunno, one of the
members of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
. 9
That advisory committee reported in December 1995,
crossed the Rubicon with respect to the decision that in
fact we ought to be regulated by an external entity in this
area but like, I suppose, many advisory committees, they
didn't come up with the recommendation that we asked them
for, which was what should be the agency that should do
this.
So in January of '96, the then-Secretary O'Leary
asked Ray Berube, on my right, the Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Environment, Safety and Health, specializing
in the environment, to work with me and a group of my
colleagues in the department to come up with a
recommendation to her on, all right, which entity, which
combination of entities should actually get into this
external regulation area.
In December we reported and the former Secretary
selected the phased NRC option that we are going to discuss
today and, as I indicated, just this past Friday we had the
opportunity to brief Secretary Pena and he supports the
direction in which we are going.
The key considerations, and these are really your
key considerations that you sent to us I believe in early
1996 or late in 1995, I can't remember, about some of the
considerations that you thought we ought to consider and we
took these very seriously as we went through the process of
. 10
coming up with our own proposal.
First, that there be a single nuclear facility
regulator, once we got to the end of this process. We think
that that is the right place to be. I think the issues of
how quickly one can get there are things that we had to
consider very much in the forefront of our deliberations.
That there be a flexible regulatory approach. And I must
say one of the things that we emphasized with the new
Secretary on Friday and that he was very clear about in
discussions with us is that it would be necessary for this
proposal to be successful that both the NRC and the DOE
probably had to change some together, if this were going to
work. That the sort of facilities that the Commission is
used to regulating most thoroughly, the sort of commercial
nuclear facilities, are somewhat different than some of our
more exotic facilities, such as Rocky Flats and a few other
places that we have --
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Having been to Hanford.
MR. GRUMBLY: Right.
Nonetheless, I think the notion that there
probably is room for us both to improve our approach is
something that we need to keep in mind. Clear legislative
authorities, who can argue with that? Obviously, we need to
do that. I think one of the issues that is on the table now
is whether even to get started whether we need some
. 11
additional legislation to get started in this.
Adequate transition planning, I have to say that
Ray and I and the rest of the task force, having lived for
some time with the transition from DOE self-regulation on
the environment to the kind of regulatory situation that we
have now, felt very strongly that we did not want to get
into the same type of situation that we encountered early on
in the environmental area, which is to say on day zero you
are self-regulated, on day one you are externally regulated,
on day two you are so out of compliance that you have to
sign up to all of these onerous agreements that then tie up
your budget for the next 37 years.
So we were very clear in thinking about this that
we needed to achieve adequate transition planning and have a
realistic time frame and scope so that we could bite this
apple in a way that we could all digest.
You obviously also talked about the need for
adequate resources and, of course, that's on both sides of
the fence. That is both in terms of the Commission's
ability to have the resources to do the kind of regulation
that is necessary so that you can be the kind of credible
regulators that you need to be and, also, the resources for
us to actually make whatever improvements to come into
compliance with what would need to be done.
Then, finally, opportunities for public
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involvement. This is one of those opportunities for public
involvement but I really took this as a much -- we really
took this as a much wider piece than that. That is that we
believe, and I certainly believe very strongly in this, that
the time is past when the federal government can operate
under the covers of secrecy, that everything that gets done
has got to be done out in the bright light of day. It makes
it harder sometimes but that's just the way it is. So
having this sort of accountable public environment in which
we are all responsible for what we do is absolutely a sine
qua non to moving forward.
We came up with a phased regulatory plan in which
we have tried and, of course, there were a lot of different
options that we considered in putting this together, ranging
from do it now, don't do it at all, do it with the Defense
Board, do it with the NRC. You know, a variety of options
that expanded and contracted and we finally came up with
this, around which we got substantial consensus in the DOE.
I mean, when I say substantial consensus, I really
don't think there was maybe but one person on the Committee
who had a different view ultimately when we came out, that
this was the right option to propose at that time and place.
And just to not be too long-winded about it, the options are
that this would be a 10-year -- the selection was that this
would be a 10-year phase in. We can talk about whether 10
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makes sense or not but you will see that there is some
analytic basis for it when we get to the next slide.
In the first five years, the Commission would pick
up selected defense programs, environmental management and
all energy research and nuclear energy, nuclear facilities
for regulation. That in the six- to ten-year time frame,
there would be regulation of selected defense program
nuclear facilities and all environmental management, energy
research and nuclear energy, nuclear facilities by the NRC.
After 10 years, the total package would be here.
With respect to the Defense Board recognizing the
really substantial expertise that the Defense Board and the
staff had, we felt that it would be appropriate that over
the next five years that we retain current oversight by the
Defense Board of the current DP and EM facilities while we
got them into shape to actually transfer them to NRC.
We don't want to have a situation where we have a
huge cliff on the day when most of these facilities are
taken over. We want to try to work over the next five
years, just to pick the number, five years plus whatever
amount of time it takes to get legislation in this area so
that really by the time most of these facilities, however
many there are, switch to the NRC, there really will be a
relatively smooth transition and not a huge gradient in
terms of what's needed to make things happen.
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In the 6 to 10-year period of time the Defense
Board would oversee only the defense programs at nuclear
facilities. Nuclear explosive safety, by the way, would
stay under all of these options with the Department of
Energy. We're not asking you to regulate the actual
development and testing, whatever form that testing would
take, of DOE's nuclear weapons facilities, and I suspect
that one of the areas that our working groups will have to
explore is exactly which facilities fall into that category
and which would fall into other defense programs facilities,
but I think that's something that's not totally clear yet
and something that we need to get straight.
And finally, after the 10-year period of time, the
very talented members of the Defense Board staff would in
fact merge with your colleagues at the NRC and the Defense
Board itself would dissolve, having I think in that period
of time been in existence for about 18 years, gone through
several different transformations, really helped improve
dramatically the safety in the DOE complex, and I think
really unlike many organizations in the world, can be said
to have done the job that it was set up to do.
If you look at the next slide, one of the reasons
why we decided that it was important to pick a 10-year
period was we took a look for cost purposes and for, you
know, how big is this elephant. We took a look at how many
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facilities were we actually talking about here, and one of
the things that we discovered as we went through this -- and
this is based on data from the DOE field, so this is not
data that's been, you know, invented by some staff person
back here at headquarters, but rather came in from the field
complexes -- well, how many nuclear facilities would there
be over x period of time?
Of course what you see is that right at about that
10-year point you get a relatively -- you go from nearly 600
facilities to roughly a little over 200. The vast majority
of those are facilities that will be going through the so-
called EM process, the environmental management process, so
when you look at the chart, and I don't think we've brought
that chart with us, but if you take a look at how this big
blue line breaks up to the different programs, the reason
why it drops off so dramatically primarily is because of the
reduction in environmental management facilities that will
have to be regulated.
This assumes that the decontamination and
decommissioning of facilities will occur under the aegis of
the Environmental Protection Agency, not under the NRC, so
the actual, you know, knocking the buildings down would not
be proposed to be part of the NRC responsibility as opposed
to the actual operation of DOE facilities that are there.
That's again another subject for conversation, but our
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conception and the reason why the line goes down so
dramatically is once you're in the D&D area, you're outside
of the nuclear safety regulatory environment. That's
consistent with where we've been with the Environmental
Protection Agency for the last several years. So what we
wanted to do was bring on the number of regulated facilities
in such a way over time so that essentially the lines met at
an appropriate place.
In terms of annual costs to the NRC this is
something that I may let my colleague, Mr. Berube, talk to
more, if you're interested in it, but we had a low estimate
and a high estimate. We believe that there's pretty good
consensus between the two agencies about what it would cost
you, although this is obviously something that's much more
in your bailiwick than ours, people are obviously concerned
about the costs of this enterprise, but if you take a look
at this costing, once you get out to the 10-year period of
time, an increment of no more than $75 to $80 million a
year, and you take a look at the declining number of
facilities that the DOE has to regulate, fundamentally what
we're going to do is -- as a government, now -- is, and we
can, you know, there's all kinds of ways to decide how to do
this, but as a government what we're going to do is fund
your regulatory activities over the money saved from the
closure in part of the DOE facilities as well as funding the
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incremental costs of improving the DOE facilities by virtue
of the fact that we're getting out of so many.
So the way in which we're able to deal with the
budget baselines that we're presented with over the next 5
to 10 years is driven very greatly by our ability to get out
of the number of facilities that we're talking about here.
So this, the chart that has the blue and the red lines, the
number of regulated facilities, has a tendency to drive the
overall capability of the system to absorb the costs in a
tough Federal budget situation, although I would have to say
that, you know, to me, I'd be willing to make the case
straight up to the Congress and to the OMB that an
incremental 75 million a year, if that was all we were
talking about, would be worth doing anyway. As we went
through the process, because -- why is that? -- because of
the tremendous benefits I think that the society will derive
in an area that we all know to be quite divisive and
problematic.
And the first is obvious, and that is that this
proposal eliminates the inherent conflict of interest from
the current self-regulation that we have. I think all we
have to do is look at the situation that we've encountered
in the last several months at the Brookhaven National
Laboratory on Long Island to see how people's perceptions
are problematic in an environment where you have the same
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entity regulating itself that's supposed to be operating
essentially the facility, and I think that it's just really
a continuation of where we've been over the last 25 years of
regulation to try to separate the regulated from the
operator -- or the regulator from the operator at the same
time. So I think that this is a very powerful argument that
the public can understand and can fundamentally agree with.
We actually believe that this proposal, taken together with
our own efforts to improve DOE's internal safety and health
program, will in fact enhance the safety and health of the
complex.
And one thing I want to be quite clear about. We
are not talking here in this proposal about deeding over the
responsibility for making DOE safe to you. That's our
responsibility. The responsibility of the men and women who
work for the Department of Energy is to ensure that our
organization, our facilities, are safe, in the same way that
it's the responsibility of the Du Pont Corporation, any of
the other corporations in America, to be safe, it's our
responsibility to do that, and in fact being able to
emphasize the line safety responsibility of our managers to
be able to ensure that they understand that it is their
responsibility and not to look over the shoulders at the
environment, safety, and health organization inside DOE that
in fact can make our place better, our managers need to know
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that they have the responsibility on the line for having
these facilities be safe.
Your job is to essentially set the rules of the
road so that consistently over time without regard to
changes in administration, without regard to changes in the
flavors of the month, safety policies that any particular
administration might come up with, is to ensure the kind of
consistency, predictable and stable environment within which
our men and women can do their job. I'm absolutely
convinced that the combination of our improving our own
safety capabilities inside plus you setting fair, flexible,
reasonable rules of the road, will in fact make the DOE
complex safer than it is today.
I think also this particular proposal will
increase the public trust and confidence because it will
lead to much greater stakeholder involvement through open
regulatory processes. We spend enormous sums of money
complying with recommendations that are essentially
developed by extraordinarily fine technical people but are
developed outside of the light of day. To me that's just
not where the public wants us to be these days. People need
to know the whys, the wherefores, and in a budget
environment that's increasingly constrained, we need to
identify why we need to make certain kinds of safety
investments, and those safety investments need to be open to
. 20
public comment and review.
I also think actually that enhanced safety will
provide for real savings. We've seen that in a number of
places that the ability to solve a problem once rather than
to Band-Aid it over time really makes our places safer
rather than less safe.
In terms of the future schedule, the first -- we
were pessimists when we put this together. Our Secretary
asked me on Friday, well, why do you think it'll take two
years to get through the process, and I said well, hey, put
our shoulders to the wheel, we'll probably be done a lot
quicker than that. But we made an assumption that the
entire process of developing, submitting, and passing
legislation would take an entire Congress, and obviously
we've just lived through a transition, so we've -- I won't
say lost, but we've been essentially in neutral for a couple
of months while we went through the process of getting a new
Secretary, thereby, I think, reinforcing the fact that it
could take two years to actually come up, get, and pass
legislation, assuming we can rally the kind of public and
congressional support for this idea that we need. And then
you can see the time line for implementation of the two
phases.
In briefing people on the Hill about this, what
we've really gotten I suppose is -- and I don't mean this as
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a term from psychiatry -- we've gotten bipolar responses to
this proposal. Actually we've gotten a lot more support on
the Hill for advancing the pace of this exercise than I
certainly would have expected going in, and obviously there
are some people who believe that the DOE is somehow giving
up its responsibility by going in this direction. I think
that there's a path that can be charted through the Congress
that will in fact result in legislation here, but I'm not
going to sit here and tell you that I think that it's a slam
dunk. It's going to be something that if we're serious
about it is going to have to be worked at.
What I can assure you of is that Secretary Pena's
support will be quite meaningful in the administration, that
there is very solid support for this inside all of the
councils of the executive branch, at the moment, and that
there's really a good opportunity to make progress on this
at this point.
What we'd like to do is -- and have been involved,
and now we will get much more deeply involved in it again --
is develop the legislative proposal, and that may be
proposals, that could be plural, because there may be some
things that need to be done in the near term as well as in
the long term about this. We'll obviously need to work
together to identify the very specific facilities -- and by
facilities I mean building by building, in some cases in
. 22
some of our complex -- that will have to be regulated.
We'll want to move as quickly as we can on the energy
research side of the equation, because we think there are
real near-term opportunities there. We'd also like to work
as quickly as we can to bring any new facilities that we're
building under this arena as quickly as possible. We don't
see any advantage to building new facilities and having them
operate under an old regulatory or oversight framework if
we're going to move to a new one.
Obviously we'd have to work together to develop
the standards to be applied to each facility, with you all
ultimately having the last call on this, develop the
schedules for regulation, do some pilots, develop whatever
draft rules are needed to regulate, and then train up the
people who are necessary to do this job.
In sum, this is not an easy task to undertake.
None of these things ever are, but it seems to me that
whether you pick a five-year period of time or a ten-year
period of time, the time is today to start working on this.
So we appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Thank you, Mr. Under Secretary.
Let me begin by asking you a few questions and
then I'll defer to my Commission colleagues.
This ten-year schedule, is this related to a
specific plan that DOE has relative to decommissioning or
. 23
closing?
MR. GRUMBLY: No. No, this is not for example
related to the Environmental Management Ten Year Plan that's
been out on the street.
I mean it happens to coincide but it wasn't
developed that way. It was simply the Task Force's best
estimate at the time of what it would take to get from here
to there in a way that was orderly and that could meet the
demands that we have, but it is not written in stone. There
are certainly ways to accelerate it, if we should want to do
that, and we think that that would be feasible too.
Frankly, if we get the sense mutually that there's
sufficient political support for this, we could advance the
time period quite considerably.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: I am looking at this number.
This is on page 7 of the regulated facilities, and you
reference a decreasing number of facilities.
MR. GRUMBLY: Right.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: And I guess I am interested
does this relate to a known plan for the closure of --
MR. GRUMBLY: This represents, as I understand it,
and Ray Pelletier is here -- why don't you jump in, since
you put the number together? -- this relates to a roll-up of
an information call that we made from our field offices
based upon the best currently available targets estimates
. 24
that we have from the Office of Management and Budget, but
fundamentally the views of our people is that a lot of this
is not related to -- within certain bounds it's not related
to whether the department has 5.4 or 5.7 or 5.9 billion
that, you know, while there's -- I wouldn't want anybody to
hold me to a point estimate in any given year that roughly
how this is how things are going to be, right?
MR. PELLETIER: That's accurate, Tom.
We simply ask the sites in five years which
facilities will be expected to be shut down, which
facilities you expect to continue operating for some time,
and they gave us back numbers and we just plugged them into
the graph.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay. Could you give me -- you
mentioned D&D facilities -- facilities under Decommissioning
and Decontamination would be under EPA and not NRC with the
knocking down of buildings, so I would take it that the
Hanford Tank Waste Remediation project is not a knocking
down of buildings?
MR. GRUMBLY: No, we would envision that being one
of the early entrants into this program.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay. Then if I am looking at
page 8. I am going to try to go fast here. These costs are
on an ongoing basis and therefore do not include what the
transition costs would be?
. 25
I mean --
MR. GRUMBLY: Well, these are costs to you, now.
These are not costs to the DOE system, right?
MR. BERUBE: That's right. When the Advisory
Committee that Mr. Grumbly mentioned earlier was conducting
its study, it requested from NRC Staff an estimate of the
costs and what we did was adjust that cost estimate to
reflect the decreased universe of facilities, down from 600
to roughly just a little over 200, and then we ran that very
rough estimate by NRC Staff, and so there is general
agreement that that is order of magnitude correct.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: No, I understand. I guess what
I am really trying to get at though is the following.
You mentioned not having cliff regulations.
MR. GRUMBLY: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: And therefore, you know, one
would have some transition period, and so you imagine during
that transition period all of the costs would be borne by
DOE, is that correct?
MR. GRUMBLY: Right.
MR. BERUBE: Right. This chart is merely NRC
costs, not DOE costs associated with the transition.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Right, but -- okay. With the
transition itself --
MR. BERUBE: Getting the facilities --
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MR. GRUMBLY: In shape.
MR. BERUBE: -- upgraded --
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: In good shape.
MR. BERUBE: -- so that we can transfer them over
to external regulation by NRC.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay.
MR. BERUBE: There is a separate estimate of costs
associated with those upgrades, and it is a rough estimate
that we have used. It's 10 percent of the amount that we
spend on safety and health within the DOE complex.
MR. GRUMBLY: Just to give you a sense of this,
we -- our current, if you look at the President's budget for
fiscal year 1998, you'll see for example an environmental
program estimate that goes out through -02 of about $5.5
billion.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Yes.
MR. GRUMBLY: Steady, right? We expect that
sum -- but then you can look at the facility aspect and see
the number of facilities going down in that period of time.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Right.
MR. GRUMBLY: So conceptually what we are going to
be doing is funding whatever improvements that we have on
the difference between, as we bring facilities out of
service, how we have to shift funding to improve those
facilities that still exist.
. 27
We don't want to be in the business of making
major upgrades on facilities that are not going to be
operational by the time you get around to them.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Yes. I guess all I am really
trying to understand is what we mean by annual costs to NRC.
Let me explain to you what I mean.
Today if we in our regulation of a reactor site --
I don't know -- you know, we are 100 percent fee-based. I
think this is all in the public domain. We're talking
roughly $3 million per reactor site.
So if I look at this viewgraph that says 200
facilities and realizing that they are different, okay, you
know, out at some 10 year window after the legislative
phase, then you are talking 200 facilities for $75 million,
and so my mathematics -- that is what I am trying to talk
about when you talk about the apportionment of costs, you
know, what do we mean?
Do you mean some kind of infrastructural cost to
NRC on which other costs would be added? See, that is all I
am really trying to find out.
MR. BERUBE: Okay, and let me answer by indicating
that again when the Advisory Committee was doing its study
it came to NRC Staff, which applied these cost factors by
the different types of facilities.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay.
. 28
MR. BERUBE: Now we have lumped all of the
facilities together but -- and then just simply pro-rated
down, but we think it's still a representative estimate of
the cost that includes all of the things that you did
mention.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay, so let's round this up to
$100 million -- so we are saying $100 million for 200
facilities, so you are basically talking about some kind of
averaged, amortized -- you know, annualized cost of on the
order of a half million, where some could be more and some
could be less. Is that the point?
MR. BERUBE: Yes, although I feel fairly
comfortable with the $75 million.
[Laughter.]
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: I know your point. Okay. Let
me just ask you a couple quick questions about the
legislative phase, and then I'll defer to --
MR. GRUMBLY: Because if it gets to the $600
million phase we can forget about this.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: What assistance or working
relationship would DOE expect from NRC during the next two
years while we're in the legislative phase.
MR. BERUBE: I think that the task force that the
Commission is proposing to create and deal with all of these
issues, the policy, legal, technical issues, is exactly the
. 29
thing that we need at DOE to interact then with NRC.
I think we need to work on identifying likely
pilots, the additional MOUs that will allow NRC to work with
DOE in all of this over the time that it takes to get the
legislation enacted.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Have you yourself created a
task force that would be -- have you identified a group and
a point person that would work with our task group to move
things along in this phase?
MR. GRUMBLY: Well, you can bet that Dr. Berube
here is going to be central to that as well as Ms. Sullivan
in the General Counsel's office, but really we were -- you
know, we have had a Secretary for 17 days now and actually I
think that the fact that this was on his agenda as early as
it was is interesting, but we'll be identifying a task force
now that we have his direction to move forward so that we
can do the kind of interaction that you are talking about.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay. Let me ask you this.
Has DOE developed any preliminary legislation that
would in any sense transfer a regulatory responsibility or
be enabling in any way at this point, and if so, can you
describe it?
MR. GRUMBLY: We have a draft but it is very much
a preliminary draft at this point and I think we would
probably prefer --
. 30
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Not to have to --
MR. GRUMBLY: -- not to embarrass ourselves by
describing it in detail at the moment.
Mary Anne?
MS. SULLIVAN: I have not actually even seen the
draft. It's in a very preliminary stage.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: So you have not had an
interaction with NRC attorneys on this --
MS. SULLIVAN: Not yet.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: -- this draft.
MR. GRUMBLY: No. We have really been waiting for
this little watershed to make that happen.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Then one last thing. I want to
revisit the question of the sense of Congressional support
for this proposal.
You mentioned this was, as you say, in non-
psychiatric terms a bipolar response.
But there was support for in some sense advancing
things. Is this response bipartisan where it is positive?
MR. GRUMBLY: Yes, I think I can say that.
It's actually been quite surprising to me to go up
on the Hill to committees like -- and this was just at the
staff level -- I want to emphasize that. I haven't talked
about this with any of the principals so far, but at the
staff level of several of the committees there's been a fair
. 31
amount of interest in accelerating the proposal.
I think, you know, the interest really stems from
trying to get as clear as possible a sense for who is really
regulating DOE.
One of the problems that we have, Madam Chairman,
is a lack of clarity sometimes about roles and
responsibilities, and if you have too many people engaged in
giving too much direction to the same people, what we end up
having is multiplying costs rather than eliminating them.
Actually, a lot of the interest is driven by a
desire to drive down the costs of health and safety
regulation in the Department, so, you know, we certainly
still have all the support that we had from Congressman
Miller and other people who initially suggested this who
came from the Democratic side of the equation, and what I
have been surprised at is how much support has been building
for this from the Majority side of the equation at the
moment.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: You mentioned having not so
many different regulators but you do reference EPA, OSHA and
then there is the issue of the states.
MR. GRUMBLY: Just like any other corporation.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay, so you are thinking of
delineation of responsibility in a way not unlike there
would be delineation today for private entities between --
. 32
MR. GRUMBLY: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: -- between OSHA, EPA --
MR. GRUMBLY: Yes. The basis for this support,
frankly, inside the Administration rests on a simple
premise: the Department of Energy should be treated as much
like corporate America as possible.
Recognizing the difference that we get our money
the old-fashioned way -- it's appropriated -- but
nonetheless the intellectual model is behave and be seen as
much like the private sector as possible.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Okay. Commissioner Rogers.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: Well, just coming back to
the cost question, I know you've got a lot of things rolled
together here in the facilities definition, but what is a
facility?
MR. BERUBE: It's everything from a reprocessing
canyon to a hot cell. And we actually do have a detailed
list of facilities that we would envision as our next step,
sitting down with NRC staff and working through this in a
very detailed manner.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: Well, I was just trying to
make a little sense out of, you know, trying to correlate
the schedule on page 6 of what happens in the first five,
the next five, and after that years, and the types of
facilities that NRC would be taking over regulation of and
. 33
how that might relate to the cost question. In the first
five years what do you see as the mix of hot cells to larger
facilities? What is that, and how does that compare with
the next five years?
MR. BERUBE: Okay. In fact the phasing program
that we came up with reflected the different types of
facilities as well as the numbers. And Ray, help me on
this, but as I recall, given that total universe, the ER --
energy research -- and nuclear energy facilities account for
about 20 percent of the total universe currently of nuclear
facilities. Now in addition that population includes things
for which NRC currently regulates in the private sector,
some research reactors, for example, and other things like
that. So it seemed to us to make sense that that's where we
should start this transition.
Now in addition, though, given that the end point
here, this anticipated, this NRC regulation of everything,
anything new, any new nuclear facility, would just seem to
make good, common sense to start NRC involvement in that on
day 1 as opposed to doing it some other way and then running
into a major obstacle. So that's the terminology on
selected DP and EM facilities. What we have in mind there
are the new nuclear facilities.
Now, that second phase then, what's happening
there, as Mr. Grumbly indicated, is the second phase really
. 34
picks up all of the environmental management facilities, but
what's happening over time with those, a lot of them are
being shut down, and more important with respect to nuclear
safety, the nuclear hazard, hopefully will be redressed at
that point in time.
Now that's the concept generally. I think again
we need to work out site by site and facility by facility
with NRC staff whether that in fact is the case, and to the
extent it's not, then we're going to have to make some
contingency plans for those.
MR. GRUMBLY: It's probably worth noting that part
of the proposal, at least in the report that Secretary
O'Leary accepted, is that if you were to follow this model
at the end of the five-year process you would have to lay a
proposal on the table really with the Congress to flip to
the next round, which is to say the President would get
another bite at this apple. So either on a facility-by-
facility or groups of facilities, the -- you know, we don't
envision just tossing these over the transom at somebody
before they're ready to be regulated by somebody else.
There has to be some fail-safe systems built into this.
MR. BERUBE: And then the third phase picks up
what's left of the defense weapons complex at that point in
time, which may not -- definitely will not include the sort
of nuclear facility production facilities we had in the
. 35
past. So that's the general concept behind this phasing.
And as Mr. Grumbly is pointing out and what we tried to
depict in this chart on page 7 is that what's envisioned
here is a ramping up and not a sudden step function. And
during the first phase where we're moving toward external
regulation of the energy research and nuclear energy
facilities, we'd be planning for all of the environmental
management facilities, laying out detailed schedules for
getting those facilities that will come under external
regulation upgraded. So it's all a phasing approach to this
transition.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: Well, what I was looking at
is the annual cost to NRC, and I noticed that, you know,
there's a slope change between the first five years and the
second five years, and there's also a slope change in the
cost and also in the number of facilities. Are they
disproportional. In other words, is it the same cost per
facility in the first and the next five, and the only change
in the slope of the cost is because the number of regulated
facilities is going up more rapidly?
MR. BERUBE: Yes.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: So that doesn't take into
account anything about the nature of what might be different
in the next five from the first five?
MR. BERUBE: That's right. It does not. And we
. 36
envision, again, this cost estimate --
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: It's a very rough cut.
MR. BERUBE: That's right. It was prepared just
to answer the general question how much is this going to
cost, how much will it cost NRC, how much will it cost DOE?
And we acknowledged the need to get down to a finer level of
precision with respect to budget requests.
MR. GRUMBLY: Am I right, Ray, to emphasize again
that this cost estimate was one that was developed with the
NRC staff?
MR. BERUBE: We took the original NRC staff
estimate that was done for the advisory committee and then
made a pro-rated adjustment to it and explained to NRC staff
that that's what we had done. There was general agreement
that this was ballpark okay.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: I think that the ballpark
characterization should be emphasized.
MR. GRUMBLY: Having said that, I think it's
important to emphasize that I was not being facetious
before. If the cost of this starts to get up in the quarter
of a billion dollars a year category, we can forget about
getting that money from the Congress. So I don't know where
the notch point is in this, but speaking as a short-timer,
it's something that people better take into account and not
let the cost of this grow dramatically or, you know --
. 37
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Let me make a comment,
actually, which may relate to the notch point. You know,
you talked about facilities, your new facilities, or
facilities that look like or are like facilities the NRC
currently regulates. You also talk about the legislative
phase activities in terms of initiating pilots. So the
question I was going to ask is kind of a follow-on in terms
of this, it falls into the financial part, is do you
consider the initiatives to first of all include the pilots,
rather to include initiatives already under way, such as the
Hanford.
MR. BERUBE: Yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Secondly, would you intend for
the pilots to be risk-informed, that that would be a
selection mechanism out of a possible universe, because in
principle that could be a model and would define a notch
point, so to speak.
MR. GRUMBLY: I certainly think that would be one
of the major considerations, yes, perhaps not the only one.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: Yeah, well I think that, I
don't know, I don't know exactly what the NRC staff took up
with you in detail, although we did see preliminary
estimates of this over a year ago or so, and they were very
rough, I mean, they were very rough. So my only point is
without being unkind I would be cautious about how
. 38
comfortable you feel with that $75 million.
MR. GRUMBLY: I just want to --
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: You know, there's a lot of
review has to go in as to what kinds of facilities, and even
so, I don't think probably our staff would be willing to say
that, you know, that's a final number that they support at
this point. I think you have to see how the analysis comes
out.
MR. GRUMBLY: I want to be clear, Mr. Rogers, that
the first draft, as I understand it, numbers that you saw
had an assumption in it that you were going to regulate 630
facilities. So one of the major drivers in the initial
staff estimate was the numbers of facilities, and that's
been changed quite a bit.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: Well, you take the 600 and
divide it by some total -- to take some total number and
divide it by 600 and then take that number and start using
it when you get down to the smaller number of facilities,
you're going to be in real trouble.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: I think though that it's clear
that we're not going to work out a number here at this
table, and therefore the actual wiggle room is somewhere
between perhaps this initial slice and what the Under
Secretary refers to as the notch point, and so we work at
it.
. 39
MR. GRUMBLY: I would just urge you to consider
the fact that for whatever its problems, the defense nuclear
facilities safety Board oversees the entire DOE complex for
$16 million.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Well, as I say, we'll stay
where we were.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: It's irrelevant.
MR. GRUMBLY: Not irrelevant to them.
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: Well, it is to me.
At any rate, let's turn to slide 10, and what
happens at the end of five years in the little vertical
dotted line between partial external regulation and complete
external regulation? What do you see happening at that
point, and who do you see involved in deciding whether
that's ready to happen to go from phase 1 to phase 2?
MR. BERUBE: Okay, what we had envisioned is
basically a status report reporting back on how phase 1 went
in terms of the transition, the associated cost, problems
that were encountered, and then it provides for the
Secretary to make a recommendation to the President as to
whether or not to continue into phase 2, and the President
turn to Congress and, as I recall, we have a few different
options on how that legislation could work. It could be a
lie-before-Congress mechanism where the -- unless the two
Houses of Congress -- and Mary Anne, maybe you can help me
. 40
with this one -- objected, the implementation program would
go forward if that were the President's decision.
MR. GRUMBLY: Right.
MR. BERUBE: There's an element of that that's
related to the cost, because there was concern -- and again
I think this has to do with the total universe of facilities
that we originally were talking about, the 630-plus --
concern that if you tried to have all those facilities
operate under NRC regulation, there wasn't enough money in
the Treasury to do that, and of course that isn't what the
plan is, and it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to
develop a regulatory structure for facilities that are out
of operation and going to be D&D'd. So to address that
concern we provided this relief provision that would allow a
revisit of cost in other aspects of this before going to the
next phase and then finally the same thing for the final
phase.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner Dicus.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Yes, let's go to slide 5 on
the key considerations, and it's a question that the
chairman has already addressed with you, but I want to take
it a step further or get it clarified. This is on the
single entity regulating nuclear safety, and together with
what the role of the States may be. As we all know, you
have activities at the facilities, such as accelerators, X-
. 41
rays, which we do not regulate. So is it clearly understood
that that would not necessarily change, but you would work
with the States for that regulatory --
MR. BERUBE: Yes. Yes, it is.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: That would be coordinated in
some way with this 10-year plan?
MR. BERUBE: Yes, ma'am.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Then go to -- and not to beat
a dead horse -- but go to slides 7 and 8. Just a couple of
points that I want to make.
It seems as though these cost considerations, and
we all know we can't come up with a figure, and we're not
interested in doing that, but we're interested in looking at
trends, and some concepts here. I'm very much keyed on this
number of facilities going down. Now what is this doesn't
happen, this schedule is not made? That changes obviously
the slope and everything else here, and I simply want to
make that point.
The second point, I think you said you're
considering in the neighborhood of 10-percent increase in
cost over what the facilities are costing now to bring them
up to a standard, did I hear that right, for roughly
that's --
MR. BERUBE: Ten percent.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Is that across the board?
. 42
MR. BERUBE: Yes.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: For all of the facilities, or
some will be more and some will be less?
MR. BERUBE: We used a rough approximation of 10
percent, and we based that on a limited benchmarking study,
we went to some NRC-regulated entities to get an indication
of what sort of cost increases they believe are related to
NRC regulation. Interestingly, some of them pointed out, by
the way, that they think actually they have cost reductions
associated with NRC regulation. But it ranged from 4
percent to 24 percent, but a strong grouping around 5 to 10
percent. Then we used the 10 percent to be conservative in
trying to develop our estimates, and we applied that against
what the Department is currently spending for health and
safety. The Department of Energy does not budget separately
for health and safety, so all you can do is come up with
estimates.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Okay. I was a little
concerned about the 10 percent and how you arrive at the
figure. Having had experience in dealing with the gaseous
diffusion plants, you know, there were some -- a lot of
money had to be spent to bring those in.
MR. BERUBE: We also looked at the experience with
the gaseous diffusion plants to try to validate the
estimates, and I don't think it would have been correct to
. 43
use the uranium enrichment plants, the gaseous diffusion
plants, as representative for everything in the Department.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: And I would agree.
MR. BERUBE: We ran a rough validation.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: What about also, one final
point, and then we can give up the mike, as it is, but what
about unknowns, for example, the Brookhaven Laboratory
problem. Those considerations are out there. Is that built
in -- that has to be built in.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Do you have a contingency --
COMMISSIONER DICUS: A contingency plan.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: For emergent issues.
MR. GRUMBLY: No, we don't have a contingency for
emergent issues. What we have is -- for example, what we
have to do at the moment is take a look at all of our
programs across the Department and see where we could put
the money together for the appropriate reprogrammings to
deal with this situation at Brookhaven. But I actually
think that that situation actually argues this case, in that
my very strong belief is that if you all had been regulating
Brookhaven over the last 10 years that at the very least the
pool -- the fuel pool leak is something that (a) would have
been identified sooner and, two, would have been remediated
sooner. So I'm hopeful that -- actually we use Brookhaven
as an example of what we can avoid rather than what we have
. 44
to budget for.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Well, I tend to agree with
you, but, you know, the point is if we --
COMMISSIONER ROGERS: I understand.
COMMISSIONER DICUS: Already taken Brookhaven over
and then discovered this problem.
MR. GRUMBLY: Well, but let me emphasize the
necessity to, I think, get into the ramp up so that we
really are planning beforehand with some degree of certainty
so that we encounter whatever additional problems are going
to be before we make it subject to your regulatory
authority. Now I can't guarantee that if you were to take
over energy research reactors tomorrow the rest that you
wouldn't have found this problem. Obviously you would have,
and that would have been some difficulty.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: That's why it's a ramp up.
MR. GRUMBLY: Yes, yes.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Anything else?
Commissioner Diaz.
COMMISSIONER DIAZ: Yes. You talked earlier about
work protection and OSHA and I guess the report from the
National Academy of Public Administration recommends that
radiation protection be given to OSHA. Has DOE revised that
position to consider that actually we do radiation
protection?
. 45
MR. GRUMBLY: I think that we recognize that we
have to reconcile that position. We haven't done so yet.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Anything else?
Commissioner McGaffigan?
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: I'm going to beat on the
dead horse, the cost horse. That slide number eight, one
thing that I think is clear is the slope that the intercept
at year zero isn't zero. We're already looking forward to
Hanford tanks, we're budgeting $2 million this year to just
do something that we don't really have authority to do yet
until we get some legislative -- that we wouldn't be able to
do if you returned to us in 1999 or 2000.
So there is some number, and it may well be close
to $10 million, as you start to think about a bunch of sites
that you have to -- we have to get our regulatory framework
in place and work with you and we will have very complex
sites like the Hanford tank vitrification and then we will
have some much less complex sites. So I think there is an
intercept there above zero and maybe the staff can work out
what it is.
I also am impressed. Commissioner Dicus referred
to the USEC case and we all have to hope that that isn't
going to be typical but that -- your report refers to an
enlightened compliance regime and we did something with the
gaseous diffusion plant short of full licensing
. 46
certification and it was intensive on our part. The staff
could give you the dollars. And it was terribly -- the
number, I think, that has been cited to me is it took $200
million to get those plants -- DOE cost, not NRC cost -- to
get those plants up -- or USEC costs -- to get those plants
up to where they needed to be; 170 of that was what they had
to spend to get them up to the place where they should have
been and 30 of it was whatever additional costs we imposed
through the licensing process. At least that's what I have
heard.
So my sense is, looking at your complex and having
some experience with it, there may well be a few others like
that out there that are going to be outliers where this 10
percent is going to prove to be just way, way off. Ten
percent may well be accurate for many of the less complex
facilities but for these, you know, I can think of several
other cases which are likely to be ongoing which may
surprise us sharply on the upside and I just make that
point.
MR. GRUMBLY: I take that point as the same one
that Commissioner Rogers was making, that there is going to
be quite a bit of variability in terms of what it costs to
get in compliance. We do have some numbers and maybe I can
submit these for the record but just to put the gaseous
diffusion plant costs into some kind of perspective, the
. 47
operating costs over four years for the gaseous diffusion
plants is about $2.4 billion. Our best estimate on the
corrective action costs were 105 million on top of that.
The NRC certification costs were 3 million and the
DOE certification costs were 35. So if you actually look at
the corrective action costs, as a percent of the total
operating costs of the facility, it actually is inside that
10 percent range that we were talking about.
Now, you're right, we can't afford at every
facility, I mean, gosh, if each facility were to cost that
amount of money, we would be cooked. So that is not
certainly what we envision.
I do think that the gaseous diffusion experience
points out the necessity for another point that was made
here. We talked about flexible regulatory approach. It
does seem to me that there are a lot of lessons that can be
learned on both sides from the gaseous diffusion experience
and we ought to spend some time making sure that we have
learned all those lessons so that we don't have an unduly
expensive process as we go forward.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Your report refers to a
workable, enlightened compliance regulatory framework. I
don't expect that is again something the staff may flesh out
a bit. But what do you have in mind?
Do you believe that any of your sites, take the
. 48
ones that you are proposing the first few years, the NE and
ER sites, do you think that they can come in and apply for
broad scope license and really be licensed or even the less
complex, familiar sites do you think will have to make
adjustments?
MR. BERUBE: I think there is potential there but
we have to work a lot more details out with NRC staff. The
concept of the enlightened compliance was not ours; we stole
that. We borrowed it from NRC. It is basically doing
things better and smarter and, yeah, there is always
opportunity for that. Performance based.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: They got it from the
certification process.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: Nick Timbers may have
some views on that.
The enforcement aspect, once we have this
regulatory framework in place, and this is really following
up again on one of Commissioner Dicus's questions, and we
have a problem arise and it is not the current contractor's
fault perhaps or, I don't -- you know, it will depend on
some fairly complex contract clause as to whether you guys
try to blame the contractor or they try to blame you. How
do we enforce at a site or facility, it's facility by
facility, as I understand it, not site by site, where we, as
the regulator, find you and your contractor going like this.
. 49
MR. GRUMBLY: Mary Anne, why don't you talk about
how we are enforced against in the environmental arena at
the moment.
MS. SULLIVAN: There is some variability. At many
of our facilities, both DOE as owner and the contractor as
operator are on a permit, on a license and the state
regulators are free to enforce against either or both.
Whatever contract disputes may exist between DOE and its M&O
contractor should not have the NRC entangled.
Whoever you hold liable will be liable and then we
fight out with our M&O contractor whether they are
responsible for a fine or penalty or corrective action or we
are. But you will have clear regulatory authority to
enforce against whoever is on the license or the
certification.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: You realize that part of what
happens in enforcement space is not just civil penalties but
the ability to shut a facility down for cause.
MR. GRUMBLY: We have that now.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: In the area of pilots --
MR. GRUMBLY: From the public's perspective, that
has to be the case. If you don't have that capability with
respect to us, this is a paper tiger.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: In the area of pilots,
again looking at these early phase projects, the NE and ER,
. 50
you currently regulate them through contract clauses
largely, is that -- I mean, contract clauses and various
orders that come out through the DOE system. How -- if you
try to do one, earlier, Tom, you talked about doing
something as quickly as possible at some of the ER sites.
How quickly could you -- are you going to have to
renegotiate contracts and take some of those contract
clauses out or how complex is the interaction between this
regulatory change that you are proposing and your
contracting system?
MS. SULLIVAN: We will have to renegotiate
contracts because we do currently regulate through our
contracts. But there will be a period required to draft and
implement legislation and any contract amendments could be
accomplished during that time frame.
I will tell you that particularly at the NE and
the ER facilities, our contractors are champing at the bit
to be regulated by NRC. So we would expect to be able to
move through the contract negotiations expeditiously.
Certainly I would not expect that to be the lagging item.
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: So that might
take -- that would have to wait for the legislation to be
completed and then very quickly negotiated after that? Or
could you do them ahead of time?
MS. SULLIVAN: My assumption is we could be
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working in parallel, recognizing that final action on a
contract would have to await the shape of the final
legislation.
MR. BERUBE: Related to that, we have already
initiated within DOE, but we need to work this with NRC
staff a comparability study, looking at the DOE orders and
seeing how they compare with NRC requirements. To the
extent there is close comparability, that is going to make
that transition a whole lot easier.
MS. SULLIVAN: In fact, in our recent rulemakings,
as we have developed our rules, we have looked to the NRC
rules as a major source of learning.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Being the lawyer, do you have
any particular caveats or thoughts about the legislative
phase that we need to hear about? I mean, I know you said
you are not comfortable, that the draft is so much a draft,
nor have you seen it, that you would not like to comment.
But we --
MS. SULLIVAN: I have been involved in discussions
toward the development of the draft. I just think our own
thinking has been evolving about what's needed. As the
lawyer, I would only say we need the legislation to be clear
so that everybody knows what the rules of the road are. But
I have been working with this working group for over a year
now and I think that this can only improve nuclear safety in
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DOE facilities so I strongly support it.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Any response from our lawyer?
MS. CYR: I think she's right. It would certainly
add clarity to the situation.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: Commissioner McGaffigan?
COMMISSIONER McGAFFIGAN: That is all I had.
Although speaking as a former congressional aide, if you
expect clear legislation --
[Laughter.]
MS. SULLIVAN: We can always hope.
CHAIRMAN JACKSON: That's right. Hope springs
eternal.
Well, thank you very much, Mr. Grumbly, and your
colleagues for a most informative briefing.
As I had indicated in my opening remarks, the
Commission does endorse the department's proposal for
external regulation of nuclear facilities and believes that
external regulation by the NRC would serve the best
interests of the public and contribute to protecting
facility workers, the public and the environment. Today's
briefing was a good start for the many interactions that
will be needed between our agencies if this initiative is to
succeed.
In the staff requirements memorandum that the
Commission issued last Friday, the Commission directed the
. 53
staff to complete several of its directives by June 30 of
this year. Perhaps the Department of Energy as well as the
NRC task force can brief the Commission in that same time
frame on the status and progress that has been made on the
initiative at that point.
The Commission encourages the staffs of both
agencies to work together openly and cooperatively on a
project that the Commission believes will be challenging to
both agencies. But even though the Commission recognizes
the complexity of the tasks that lie ahead, we have
confidence that the external regulation of DOE's nuclear
facilities by the NRC can succeed in a manner that serves
the public well. To that end, I would say that both DOE and
NRC need to develop on an expedited basis an MOU, a
memorandum of understanding, to establish the framework for
the legislative and follow-on phases to identify key
regulatory and technical issues, to identify candidate
facilities.
Also, both agencies need to work with the OMB to
get relief from personnel ceilings, particularly for us.
But have you work with us for both the legislative and the
follow-on phases.
In the interim, I would ask DOE if you would study
the staff requirements memorandum from the Commission to the
staff because it is fairly detailed and prescriptive with
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respect to the issues we feel need to be addressed as well
as the approach that NRC would propose to take. I would
also urge you to form a corresponding working group with a
designated point of contact. The designated point of
contact for us will be Dr. Carl Paperiello, who heads our
Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards.
I would thank the Secretary and urge Secretary
Pena's continued support of this initiative.
So, unless my fellow commissioners have further
comments, we are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 3:42 p.m., the meeting was
concluded.]
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