 All right folks, I hope you can hear me in the room there and online, thanks for joining us late this afternoon for what should be an engaging panel. I'm going to do a few opening remarks here, introduce our panel and then we'll get into today's discussion. So obviously the title of today's panel is Increasing Efficiency and Transparency to Meet the Changing Landscape of the National Environmental Policy Act, which is a long title and perhaps appropriate because there's been lots of changes happening lately and lots of changes still under consideration. This is my second Rick as a commissioner and this is the second time I've chaired this panel and it's amazing to me how much has changed on this front just since doing this last year. We have a very distinguished panel with us today, honored to have all of them here. They bring a very wide ranging and deep experience in this area and appreciate their willingness to participate and come up here to beautiful north Bethesda and it is a beautiful day so I don't feel too bad that you had to come up our way. Before I begin, a few housekeeping items for everyone in the audience and online. Please remember to silence your phones. The Q&A portion of the session will be done through electronic means like every other session at the RINC that's for virtual and in-person attendees and for those in the room you can scan the QR code to submit questions and towards the end of our time today I'll take some questions with the help of my staff over here from the list of audience questions that you guys submit during our discussion and then at any time during the conference for this session or otherwise we appreciate you scanning the feedback QR code and giving your thoughts on how things went. So with that let me introduce our panel today. First it's an honor and pleasure to introduce Dr. Anru Cohen. Dr. Cohen currently serves as the senior director for NEPA infrastructure and clean energy at the White House Council on environmental quality on his working to make federal permitting more effective and efficient to help meet President Biden's climate and clean energy goals. She spent more than two decades working on U.S. federal climate and energy policy in Washington. She was majority staff director of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis and has held other senior positions in the House and Senate. Dr. Cohen was also a distinguished visiting fellow at the Center for Global Policy at Columbia University and has worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for American Progress. She has a B.S. in chemistry from Trinity University and a doctorate in philosophy in neuroscience, a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Oxford. You'll fit right in here with our NRC crew. They're very educated as well. Next we're joined by Mr. Peter Hastings of Cairo's Power. Thanks for being here with us today, Peter. Peter leads the Cairo's team responsible for licensing, risk informed safety analysis and probabilistic risk assessment, quality assurance, nuclear safeguards and security and government affairs. Mr. Hastings is a member of the board of directors of the U.S. Nuclear Industry Council, chair of the Nuclear Energy Institute's Advanced Reactor Working Group, Advanced Reactor Regulatory Working Group and an appointed member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Civil Nuclear Trade Advisory Committee amongst many other advisory and leadership roles. Peter and a B.S. in nuclear engineering from NC State University and is a registered professional engineer in both of the Carolinas. Next, Ms. Melanie Snyder joins us today. She serves as the Nuclear Energy Policy Program Manager for the Western Interstate Energy Board's High-Level Radioactive Waste Program and Committee, as well as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Transportation Technical Advisor Group. Together with these committees, Ms. Snyder engages with the U.S. Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other state, regional and tribal groups on the transportation component of the nation's programs for disposition of commercial spent nuclear fuel and high level defense wastes. Melanie Holt to JJ from the University of Denver and a B.S. in Chemistry also from the University of Denver. Last but not least, we're joined by my NRC colleague, Mr. Chris Reagan. He is NRC's director of the Division of Rulemaking, Environmental and Financial Support Services as the NRC's Chief Environmental Review and Permanent Officer and the Federal Preservation Officer. Chris is responsible for leading the agency's environmental reviews. He has more than 32 years of experience as a regulator in the nuclear energy industry. He was selected for into the senior executive service in 2017 and has served in multiple executive positions at NRC before being assigned to his current position in July of 22. Chris holds an MS in Engineering Management and ABS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland. So thank you all for being here today. I'm looking forward to the discussion, as I think our participants are as well. But to start the discussion and kick us off, I'm going to look to you to provide a little context for the audience on the role that CEQ plays with respect to NEPA, some of the recent developments to the extent you can share ongoing developments and just set the stage for where CEQ and NEPA fits in and then we'll start with some questions about how it applies to the nuclear sector. Well, thank you, Commissioner. It's great to be here with you all today and with this distinguished group of panelists. I know many in this room and listening probably are quite familiar with the National Environmental Policy Act. But we do have a diverse group, so I just wanted to spend a few minutes to get everybody on the same page. NEPA became law in 1970 signed by President Nixon and really kicked off a flurry of environmental lawmaking over that next decade that has informed and driven the United States environmental work since then. NEPA did really two main things. It created the Council on Environmental Quality at the White House. Our current chair is Brenda Mallory and she serves, she leads the Council and our staff to help advise the President on a whole host of environmental, environmental justice, energy, conservation issues. The other main thing that the law did was create this process for federal agencies to analyze their actions and ensure that what the government is doing is not harming people or the environment. And to do that, public engagement is a critical piece of it. So we like to think of NEPA and the NEPA review process as asking the federal government and agencies to sort to look before they leave. So it doesn't prescribe any outcome, but it provides a process for agencies to look at the effects, the significant effects that their actions might have on the environment and inform their decision making that way. It has, as you might imagine, there's a lot of agency practice. There's been a lot of litigation over the years that has informed CEQ's regulations on NEPA practice, which then each agency has their own NEPA procedures in place. And there's really a lot of history and experience that goes into that. More recently, as the Commissioner alluded to, we actually, Congress amended the law back in June of last year. It amended NEPA in bipartisan negotiations with the White House, and those were really the first significant amendments since the 1970 law. A lot of the focus on those amendments are ways to make NEPA reviews more effective and efficient. Just a couple there now are time constraints for agencies when they're doing an environmental impact statement of two years and an environmental assessment of one year. There's another provision that has proven quite popular to allow agencies to be able to adopt something called categorical exclusions, which is sort of the lowest level of NEPA review from other agencies. And that's proven to be quite popular. And we are excited about what that will mean for moving projects forward. So to implement those changes, as well as pursue other efficiency gains, CEQ has been working on updating our own regulations. And so that proposal we put out last summer, had a public comment period, probably some of you in this room are listening, have provided us comments on that. We are working hard right now to finalize that. It is the spring. And so I am slightly constrained about what I can say on the specifics of that rule update. But the main things to understand now, and I think probably as we talk further, I can get into some additional details, is we do fully implement the amendments that were put in place last summer, as well as adding some additional tools we hope to agencies to help them meet the new time standards and other standards, but also be able to look at a broad range of actions and be able to do their NEPA review fairly quickly from those. Especially something called a programmatic environmental assessment, which allows an agency to look at a broad collection of work so that there is a foundation already for the environmental assessment. And then when a specific project comes in, they can base their, start basically from a little further down the road already because of that programmatic review that's already happened. And in addition, providing some other ways to develop categorical exclusions. A big one, especially for the nuclear industry, too, is incorporating the really decades of case law on climate change into the rules. In addition, we have this year, or last year, start of last year, put in place interim guidance on greenhouse gases and climate change for agencies. So I think that's going to be an important one for the clean energy sector. And the last thing I'll add, there's a lot, is really we see the public engagement piece as incredibly vital to having successful programs to begin with, or projects to begin with. And so the new rule has added in some additional provisions for agencies to take on along those roles. And we hope give them some more tools in that space so that we can work with communities that will host projects early on so that the end product is something that the agencies and the project developers in the communities can all be happy with going forward. I'll stop there for now. Thank you, Anna. I think that's a good table set for everyone. Just a few points of clarity. The statutory changes that Congress made to NEPA, what vehicles, did they do that twice or just once at the Fiscal Responsibility Act? Yes, it was a part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act is what amended NEPA. Their permitting has gotten a lot of attention on Capitol Hill and around the country, especially with the historic level of investment that we have from the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act moving things forward. But at the moment, there hasn't been any other additional legislation passed. OK, so for the time being, that's what we have. And even though there's lots of interests, an even numbered presidential election error is not necessarily the best odds to get additional legislation across the finish line. But this one has some bipartisan interest. And perhaps we'll see. Everything's unpredictable these days. You mentioned stakeholder outreach. And I just want to bookmark for everyone that we'll talk a little bit about stakeholder outreach today. And there's a role and a requirement for stakeholder outreach within NEPA. But there's also a very good rationale and track record for doing engagement outside of NEPA that then has a benefit for your formal NEPA processes and for your larger project development. Chris, I'm going to turn to you first if you can just give folks a sense of how you're viewing these statutory changes to NEPA and what challenges or opportunities you see for the NRC in that regard. Yeah, so up to you off of what Anna started with, with opportunities. Chair Hanson yesterday said, be the optimist. See the opportunities and the problem, the NEPA, the FRA. I won't say snuck up on us, but last summer it required some fairly significant changes. It made our life very exciting. But there are so many opportunities for us to implement changes to the way we approach environmental reviews. There were, you know, Anna mentioned public engagement, talked about some of the areas that might include how we approach doing environmental reviews for environmental impact statements, categorical exclusions, environmental assessments. So there's lots there. Specifically one of the things that also comes to mind is the amount of cooperation and collaboration we have throughout the federal government. We've been looking at establishing memorands and memorandums of understanding with some of our partner or other federal agencies to ensure we're not duplicating our environmental reviews. We looked at potentially, you know, one of the items from FRA is, you know, can an applicant develop a draft EIS or draft EA and submit that as part of their application to the agency for our review rather than having the agency or the NRC do that from scratch. And then also in the way of outreach and public engagement, the FRA really has provided us a platform or a foundation to really ramp up our pre-application engagements with stakeholders. And this is when I say stakeholders, it includes, you know, state and local governments, the public, tribal communities, and we have seen tremendous benefit from, you know, sticking to that adage of, you know, early and often communication and have had great success in multiple arenas with tribal communities and with state and local governments to proactively get the word out there and prepare folks for what the actual licensing action and environmental review may look like. Thanks, Chris. Peter, I'm going to turn to you next. I'm hoping you can give folks just a little bit of sense of what Kairos is doing. You know, your project or your full project, some of it started before these NEPA changes and some of it will continue after these NEPA changes. So maybe tell a little bit about your experience prior and then what you think it's going to look like going forward. Yeah, happy to. And thanks for the invitation to participate on this August team. I feel humbled to be among this team. So we did, we were well underway for the Hermes construction permit application review when the changes occurred. We were asked sort of in real time if it was likely to impact what was going on and we were far enough down the road by that point and the NRC staff were already doing a lot of the things that were in the FRA that we didn't perceive an immediate impact and going back to sort of force that some of the almost procedural changes wouldn't have been in anybody's benefit. So, you know, it was a bit of a no never mind for the for the Hermes application. And of course that experience was very positive for us. The Hermes construction permit was issued in December after less than two years of staff review, so a real win. The Hermes II application, construction permit application was submitted earlier this year and it's going to give us all an opportunity to sort of test drive the new way of thinking. Influenced by the FRA, not sure, but the staff leaned in to the notion of pursuing an environmental assessment in lieu of an EIS. Hermes II seems like the perfect opportunity to do that. It's the same design as was just licensed. It's on the same site right next door, so it should be a relatively easy lift to help test drive what that's going to look like for something that's bigger than a research reactor. I think going forward, that kind of approach to look for opportunities to streamline the process to make use of EAs when it's appropriate, maybe even start heading in the direction of categorical exclusions where it makes sense is a positive. With the number of applications that we anticipate going through as a country and for the regulator, those kind of process improvements are going to be absolutely necessary if we're going to meet national and international climate goals. Chris mentioned one of the provisions of FRA is the opportunity for the applicant to submit essentially the draft environmental review document whether it's an EIS or an EA. I think that makes a lot of sense and I don't think it's a particularly heavy lift because the guidance for applicant production of an environmental report, which is the input to environmental impact statement or the EA, is already formatted very consistently with the EIS. There's certainly an opportunity for some collaboration between industry and the staff to look for any deltas between what we're used to producing, what the staff is used to producing just to make sure there are no holes, but that's a relatively easy conversation and seems like a real efficiency gain for everybody, for both the applicant and the staff. I've been on the commission for a little over a year and a half now and I was surprised after joining after a while to learn that traditionally we don't use EAs, which is a little bit unique for agencies that do environmental reviews, but it also made sense too because we do kind of large one-off projects. We don't necessarily do, haven't done multiple of the same thing in adjacent or identical sites, but the Hermes project from Congress has come along kind of at the perfect time for us to test this out as we move to the second phase of Hermes. And it'll be a good opportunity, and Chris, I hope you agree because you're going to have to do it, for the NRC to kick the tires on this. And we're not going to have to do it just from an operational perspective internally with the license applicant, but there's going to be some measure of helping explain to the local community and interested stakeholders why we're doing it this way, what we haven't necessarily normally done it that way before, how they can participate, why they shouldn't be concerned that there's any short cutting going on, it's just a different process that has a different base of facts that help lead to the second step. So can you talk a little bit about how heavy a lift, even though in theory it's going to make life easier, how heavy of a lift is it going to be for your staff to do things in a different way and how are you going to help communicate to the local communities what you're doing? So yeah, thanks for the question. It's kind of a double barrel question. One, there's the external communication to make sure folks understand why we do the things or why we're doing the things that we're doing a certain way and a shift from what the past process has looked like. As far as the lift, I would like to look at it as an opportunity to, like you mentioned, test the opportunity to be more efficient. It is new, it is different. I have outstanding staff in my environmental center of expertise, it's a small number but they're a phenomenal group that tackle the environmental reviews throughout the entire agencies, all of our different business lines and different areas. But there's a constant, I think this, when I talked about being at exciting times about change, we haven't seen change in environmental reviews of this magnitude in decades. And simply having the opportunity, I'll use that word again, having the opportunity to try different things, look at different things, try different processes. It does come with some challenges and some extra effort but the return on investment could be significant further on down the road and that's really what we're after. I could cite, when people focus on FRA is like page limits and time limits is the big thing that people talk about the most but embedded in FRA are so many other of the softer things that aren't necessarily as clear but could pay benefits in the long run. Has there been an impact or is there a call? Sure, page limits was the big thing where we had reviews that were in play at the time and we had to go back and look and is it gonna meet the page limits? Do we have to refine it and cut some pages out or move it to an appendices to meet the legislative requirement? Yes, does that come at a cost? Sure, but once the process is established for the long term, the expectation is there, the precedence is there and the benefit could be significant. So it will be a heavy lift in the near term but the long term benefits are significant and I can't help but mention one of the things we've just been talking about recently amongst my staff is well, how are we gonna tackle all of the stuff we have on our plate at the moment? FRA, workload challenges, knowledge management challenges, resource challenges and we're already in the process of developing what we call a blueprint for how are we gonna tackle all this stuff? What is the framework for integrating all of these changes that are concurrently happening into our environmental review processes? Do we have a map or a plan for moving forward to get to the goal in the end? Thanks, Chris. Peter, just so I don't screw it up, remind me and the audience, your project is in Tennessee, is that correct? That's correct. Okay, which gives you a little bit of an advantage in working with stakeholders because nuclear is not new to them. There's some level of understanding but in other parts of the country like where Melanie focuses out west and as a fellow Westerner myself, and Melanie, you're gonna get this question. There's not as much familiarity with nuclear projects and there's some inherent skepticism or concern about an entity or the government's interests in doing nuclear, things where they do it in the west with storage and mining, there's just a different culture out west when it comes to nuclear. So can you first tell us a little bit about what the Western Energy Board does and how they intersect on this topic and then what your experience has been like in the west and maybe I'll pile on with you? Sure, first of course, thank you so much for the invitation to be here. This conference has been on my agenda for quite some time but it's my first chance to be here in person and it's certainly a pleasure. So the Western Energy Board or WEB is a group of western states and Canadian provinces who engage on energy topics of various stripes. So I manage our nuclear program which has typically focused on nuclear waste, specifically transportation on the electricity side of the shop as I like to say, we talk about resource adequacy and energy markets and other items like that. So we provide a space for the western states to talk to each other about various energy issues, develop policy, other things like that. So I am going to tell a little bit of an anecdote about the high-level radioactive waste committee which I provide staff support for and what their experience and my experience has been with NEPA and with nuclear projects. So around 2018 and 2020, Holtec and ISP consolidated interim storage facilities were seeking, well, the entities were seeking license applications and I wrote and helped coordinate the comments that the high-level radioactive waste committee put together on the scope of the EIS and then on the draft EIS. And those were mostly focused on transportation, encouraging the NRC to fully take into account the transportation impacts associated with those projects, looking at the different modes of transportation and then when the draft EIS came out, kind of challenging the NRC to take a closer look at some of the underlying assumptions in that transportation analysis. There were things such as that DOE was going to be the shipper which they were legally prevented from doing. There was an all-rail assumption which has typically been the assumption but was not the only possible mode of transportation. Things like shipment numbers, analyses of the cost estimates, other items like that that were just not very well supported and that analytically speaking, they were based on old assumptions and things like that. And so we submitted those comments and when the final EIS came out, of course had a very extensive section responding to all the comments that had been submitted and it would be an exaggeration to say that the comments of the committee were summarily dismissed but they were not very satisfactorily addressed in our opinion. It seemed that the conclusion of the NRC was that because of modeling and because to be fair of the transportation experiences in the past that spent nuclear fuel did not pose this significant radiological risk and therefore it didn't really seem to matter that the analytical assumptions were based on some sort of unrealistic assumptions basically that the conclusion had already been reached that transportation was safe and that the concerns of the stakeholders which the states and the tribes and the public think transportation is a huge concern and a huge issue that should be addressed in these projects were really not of high concern at least from this environmental impact statement. So it is no surprise to say that this was not a very satisfying outcome whether from a procedural standpoint or from a substantive standpoint for the states who were trying to be engaged in the process and really one of the only ways they could be engaged which was through this NEPA process and perhaps it is that NEPA is not the right vehicle for that kind of engagement but I think that because of at least partly due to some of the frustrations of that experience the states do frequently turn to the political process in order to have their voice heard which has its own kind of limitations. So just wanted to provide that. That was good chum for the water so I appreciate it. Can you just help clarify for me and perhaps others? So WEB is acting on behalf of their member state in how you, okay. And is there, I know there's sometimes how a state's perspective can overlap with the local city, county or community's perspective and sometimes a tribal government's perspective but how do those entities fit into the WEB calculation in terms of what you do? Do you have any direct nexus with local stakeholders? We mostly engage at the executive level so with energy office officials with state environmental protection agencies with state patrol and things like that and then through some of the groups that we engage with we talk to the tribes regularly as they talk to the federal government and others about transportation so get the chance to hear their perspective quite frequently but certainly do not represent them in any way or local governments. We work at the state level, regional. You know, you highlighted hopefully that NEPR provides one venue or opportunity for engagement on things but it's not necessarily the perfect vehicle and not necessarily an all encompassing vehicle. Peter, from an industry perspective, maybe you can share what you have done above and beyond or outside necessarily the context of NEPA specifically to engage the community and what the value proposition for you was in doing that. Sure, so it's in an applicant's best interest to engage the community as early as possible and as openly as possible. As you mentioned, we've had a very productive, very positive support from the community in the Oak Ridge area, perhaps not surprisingly, although that's not always the case. I've been in some other areas where you would have thought the support would have been good and it wasn't necessarily but the level of support that you anticipate isn't a reason not to engage. It's in your interest to engage, A, to try to build that level of support or B, to know early that you're not gonna have it because the last thing you want is for that backlash to occur late in the process when it may be too late to do anything about it without disrupting the schedule or the scope or what have you. So we did a lot of really active engagement in the local community. We try to do that in areas where we cite our non-nuclear facilities as well. In Albuquerque, in Alameda, we have very close relationships with the city government, with the state government, with the local community leaders, with economic development initiatives and we see it paid dividends every time to have that level of support. And I'm sorry, I just lost my train of thought. And the experience that you talk about is interesting, fascinating. Of course, I wasn't involved in that at all, but that seems to me to be a good example of where that sort of impact at the end is what you wanna try to insulate against as much as possible. We did stand up for the Hermes Reactor and the Hermes II Project, an online town hall forum that's available online. I didn't bring the link with me, but it's really slick. You can go in from anywhere in the country and you can see exactly what's going on. Our CEO does a number of presentations and it's been really productive. The one area where I'd say we did recognize room for improvement on the Hermes application was the National Historic Preservation Act 106 consultation which NEPA is sort of a carrier wave, if you will, for that level of engagement and gives the tribes the opportunities to engage. And for reasons that are nobody's fault, we had a consulting tribe on Hermes who entered the process very late and it had the potential to disrupt our schedule. It very briefly assumed sort of critical path to getting the permit out and it was a bit clunky because the tribe requested anonymity and of course we completely respect that request, but that forced all communications through the staff and it just ended up taking a lot longer than any of us would have liked. The discussions were productive. It informed our process. It informed how we're gonna do construction at the site and I think it was a net positive for everyone. The lesson we took away from it was that's an opportunity that we might have been able to engage even more fully in the community with some of the affected tribes to try to enable that conversation to happen sooner. Had they still wanted anonymity because they're frankly bandwidth constrained, we believe, it might not have helped very much procedurally but at least we would have had the opportunity to know it was coming. Yeah, thanks and we'll probably get more into the interaction with tribal governments but I don't wanna give you a chance to respond to any of this. Yeah, I just wanted to add a couple of things. I mean, first the NEPA process is aspiration is to be a forum where all of the public, communities, state and local officials will have that opportunity to communicate their views on an action with the goal, as I said, of achieving something that can be supported across the board but we don't always meet those aspirations and I really appreciate the comment about engaging with people even when you know they may not fully support the project and that piece is really critical that all viewpoints are able to be able to meaningfully give their input on a project. I was also probably remiss when talking about the fiscal responsibility act amendments and not mentioning a really important one that goes to the NEPA, the collaborative nature of NEPA which is the designation of a lead agency and cooperating agencies and there's a lot of additional direction about when a project touches on a number of different agencies, authorities and engagement, NEPA really provides that umbrella to bring many of those things together even if it is a permit driving from another law like the Clean Water Act, NEPA really provides that avenue of collaboration for agencies and that's one reason CEQ works hard to make sure that there is robust NEPA process so we can bring all of those things together and hopefully help a project that needs a number of different types of permits to then move forward that that is all organized and laid out in a way that both the project developer and the public can understand and the amendments last year I think are gonna further help that type of collaboration and visibility and transparency about schedules. So Anna in addition to CEQ's role of promulgating regulations or offering guidance on NEPA changes either statutorily required or otherwise, does CEQ play a role where they just are clearing house for best practices amongst agencies or answer clarifying questions about how something may or may not apply to a particular agency or project? Yes, that is an important part of our role. There's in addition to our CEQ regulations we have a whole host of guidance. I mentioned one earlier on climate change. We also have guidance on how to incorporate NEPA review along with the National Historic Preservation Act section 106 reviews and a number of other things. A lot of those are gonna need to be updated now that we have new regulations and that is definitely on my team's list of things to do that's gonna take a while but in the meantime, we have agencies call us up every day asking questions about particular projects or approaches. We have some, all of that information actually is on NEPA.gov so you can go there and get more information that you may want but that we do try and serve as a resource. We've actually set up a number of working groups recently to help with some of these things. Everyone has mentioned categorical exclusions at this point. That's a relatively recent working group that's been very active as a way for us to answer agencies questions and provide them with other tools as they're looking at changes to their categorical exclusions. Chris, you and your team know their phone number, I assume, you know how to contact CEQ if need be. I think we've had a recent meeting with my team. Yeah, and I'd also add to that, so there's a federal permitting improvement steering council now called the permitting council, also is a great federal government-wide platform to share best practices, raise issues, talk about how issues might be addressed and that's one that we participate in collaboratively and frequently, it's almost monthly now, either the SERPOs meet or the council members meet to talk about issues. FRA being one of the big ones. Absolutely. Yeah, and we had a representative from FIPSI join us for this discussion last year, so. There's been a little bit of mention about engaging with stakeholders regardless of whether there's a known existing concern or interest or presumed support. I alluded in my keynote remarks this morning that any project that involves nuclear will always have the interest of one or more stakeholders and so I think in the nuclear space, you're well advised to err on the side of engagement and broad but targeted engagement, so you try not to miss anyone on the front end and Mellie, maybe I'll give you a first shot at this because you mentioned that communication could have been better, maybe in the deeper context or not. Can you elaborate on what kind of engagement or discussions in your eyes could have or should have happened? Well, there's another vehicle of communication called the National Transportation Stakeholders Forum that I'm regularly a part of, which is a Department of Energy forum to talk to the states and tribes about DOE's radioactive material shipments and that is a great space where we meet regularly, we put on annual meetings to talk about what the Department of Energy is doing and I hate to admit it because I'm a big free speech fan but I think part of the reason those conversations are productive is because it is a state and tribal focused forum which gives that kind of government-to-government interaction and there's continuity of personalities so you're talking to similar people, you can build those relationships, especially in the tribal space, the relationships are hugely important. You really need to know people on a personal level to be able to talk to them substantively about things so a forum like that is certainly a much more satisfying space to air issues and to tackle things over a long course of time. I don't know if the NRC has a cognate of any sort. Well, I don't know if we have a specific corollary but we try to do the best we can to identify and do outreach or give feedback to the licensed applicant as appropriate if they're looking for insights on who they should be talking to locally. But we also are happy to receive expressions of interest that have wanting to communicate so sometimes if we didn't find you to engage you and you're in a local community, you can always let us know and we'll be responsive to that, I would hope. Peter, in your work with the Trime, I think it's notable that the tribe that spoke up at the very last minute and even having to go through this staff to facilitate the conversation, it went very well because ultimately that tribe was okay with us approving the license just slightly before we had inked the deal with them because they knew it was gonna happen and they felt confident and that's in a tribal context, that's a big sign of trust so it's notable. That's exactly right and one is always advised to go into a meeting with a tribe guardedly if you're going in to say I promise because there's a long history of lots and lots of broken promises with the tribes. And so that's the, as I mentioned, our biggest lesson is we wish we had created the opportunity to engage sooner because we would have been able to develop that sense of trust earlier and it did end up being relatively inconsequential to schedule but it could have been a bigger deal particularly if the solutions that we put on the table hadn't been satisfactory and if we'd had to iterate on it even more. And the clunkiness of the process, that's just sometimes you have to live with the procedures that are set forth. Yeah, you mentioned one challenge for tribes when they engage because they often are, they didn't ask for this project and their backyard or near their designated or traditional lands and they often don't have a lot of bandwidth to just turn on a dime and start addressing something when they've got other issues to address. And one inhibitor in my view at the NRC is that we don't have the ability or the authority to give financial assistance to tribes to engage and expand that bandwidth. I think a lot of other, especially cabinet agencies have the ability to do that and it goes a long way but either Chris or Peter, how much would that change things for you Chris or how heavy of a lift was it for you as an applicant to have to do it for the tribe or if that's even how it transpired. I don't know how you accommodated their bandwidth other than giving them time. Yeah, so the chyrus was one experience. It had its challenges with respect to maintaining the anonymity of the tribe but we had a responsibility as a regulator to reach our own conclusions relative to the cultural resources considerations that we had to make findings on. So yeah, it's part of our process. I won't say it's unusual but it shouldn't have not been unexpected that we experienced things like that. We do recognize that tribal nations do have some resource constraints that we can, I would say, just recognize that fact. So when we're communicating with them if they need more time to respond because they are spread thin with respect to resources we do our best to accommodate that. On the flip side, we have had tremendously positive experience when being proactive in reaching out to sovereign nations. Consistent with our tribal policy statement we really want to have government to government interactions with these tribal nations. We had a very positive experience with the Shoshone Bannock tribes when engaging on the carbon free power project where we were proactive in reaching out to their council offering to meet with them, to speak with them, explain to them who we are, right? And what we do and why we do it. And I think they were very grateful for that. The first meeting was very interesting from a, who are you and why are you here perspective? But after meeting with them several times, as Peter mentioned, building that relationship and that level of trust, the same people, repeated meetings it became much more collaborative and much more positive even before we had launched into the actual licensing activity. And it was mutually beneficial because we were able to leverage the expertise of the tribes, no one knows their land better than they do. So when it comes to the cultural resources evaluation they were extremely helpful in preparing us for what to look for in preparation for our licensing activities. But all of that is at the front end, laying the groundwork and building the relationship and trying to do that as proactively as we possibly can to potentially avoid the last minute engagement that we might see. And I think that we can do that, we should do that. It's our obligation. And in that example, Chris, that tribal government was primarily or exclusively familiar with working with DOE and they made an assumption that that was gonna be this exact same thing with the NRC. I mean, we're all the federal government, right? And you have to take a breath and explain how there's differences and why and introduce yourself. So that goes a long way that we've been kind of burying a little bit of lead here. But all of these actions are beneficial in the sense not only of helping complete required environmental reviews under NEPA, but in a timely but thorough way. But if you do it successfully, hopefully you head off the need or request for Stakehold is wanting to intervene. And use those levers within the NEPA process, which they have every right to do. But if they feel like they've been included in the project that they're understand the implications, you hopefully could avoid that. Before we leave tribal stuff, and I don't wanna put anyone on the spot because I can't do this, but I wanna know the answer. Could anyone help describe the difference for between tribal consultation and tribal engagement? Because they're two different things. Sure, I can try there. Tribal consultation is very specifically about the government to government conversations that happen from the US federal government through our agencies and the tribal governments involved. And while we appreciate proactive engagement from project developers, it really has to be that government to government for the required consultation. But then there are other more informal ways that I think both project developers and agencies interact with tribes. But they are two distinct things. Chris may have a more specific answer. Yeah, no, for the most part. I think the formality of consultation has specific requirements that we need to fulfill in order to move forward with our licensing action, the closure of consultation, the agreement that the actions are satisfactory to both parties to kind of close that consultation. But the engagement piece should be and is part of our licensing process where we reach out to the entire suite of interested parties in our licensing activities. You know, stakeholders, the public, the local and state governments, and the tribal nations as well, all fit into that, the folks that we need to and should engage with. And it's in both the applicants and the agency's interest to maximize the engagement. The consultation is certainly available and the tribe has every right to sort of flip that switch and enter into government-to-government consultation, but to the extent that you can sort of insulate yourself from that through thorough engagement up front and hopefully enable the tribe to conclude I don't need to flip the 106 switch because I'm getting everything I need through informal engagement is productive for everybody. Melanie, you mentioned earlier in the example you gave that a level of dissatisfaction with how the comments submitted were managed by the NRC. Can you elaborate on that at all in terms of what failed to meet the expectations or how maybe a different venue or forum for addressing those comments could have been helpful? Well, if NEPA is supposed to be helping make better environmental decision-making and the transportation component ignored realities of transportation, it was not a very satisfying planning instrument, right? And again, I don't know if that's just a limitation of the boundaries of NEPA or the environmental component or what that is, but I think that there is an interesting comparison to be drawn between NEPA and another environmental law of a similar era, which is the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act or RICRA. So NEPA's processes are kind of focused on the beginning of a project and the scoping of it and everything like that. And then the public doesn't really have a chance to engage unless there's a change or a license amendment or something like that. Contrast with RICRA, which grants through the EPA's grants of power to the states an ability to grant a license for a facility. So I'm thinking about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant or WIP. New Mexico has a RICRA permit for the hazardous waste components of that facility and that gives the state of New Mexico an enduring kind of consistent opportunity to be involved in the environmental aspects and other aspects of that facility, which as you renew the permit every 10 years, you can keep up with changing environmental concerns. It's not just at the beginning of the process and it's a much more involved process. You have to talk to the state of New Mexico about what their more deep thoughts are on that particular thing, but from my perspective, being involved in that NEPA process and then seeing the RICRA permit process occur, the renewal process was obvious at the state of New Mexico had a lot more influence on what was going on at the facility. And this is a point that has been made by, I think it was Jeff Fettis that maybe the licensing process, giving the states an actual piece of that is a better way of keeping them involved rather than this NEPA process that's sort of focused on the beginning and has not always been satisfying, at least in the nuclear sense. Yeah, and folks who aren't already aware, one unique aspect and challenge of doing these things out west is you also have a lot of federal land and that is a different dynamic than where you're just working on private lands. And with that in mind, Peter, maybe you can provide some insight to the project developers that are listening today about how you approach early thinking about site selection in terms of what's suitable for the project, but what also will, I assume there's early thinking about what hurdles you're gonna have on the permitting front and the NEPA compliance front. So this is gonna sound a little bit like a Kairos commercial and I apologize, but we have environmental justice embedded in our mission statement, which I'm gonna get in trouble if I don't read it out loud. It's to enable the world's transition to clean energy with the ultimate goal of dramatically improving people's quality of life while protecting the environment. And so we keep that notion of environmental justice in front of us in everything we do, including siding. And so we have a very strong preference for siding on brownfield sites whenever practical. Just to minimize the overall environmental impact, we try to conduct as much meaningful outreach as we can, which we've talked about. We support economic development and of course we're all about a technology that inherently offers very high energy density with minimal land use. So a lot of that is sort of baked in. With regard to Hermes specifically, we conducted a site selection analysis that's very similar for that, that's conducted for power reactors, with the distinction being that we're not a utility, we're gonna own and operate our first plant, but we're not a utility so we're not constrained by a utility service territory as a region of interest. Our region of interest was the continental United States. And from there we narrowed down based on some business case constraints around we wanted proximity to a national lab to support our testing facilities. We wanted to maximize the amount of site data that were available to facilitate rapid licensing because of our rapid iterative approach. We wanted to be able to deploy this thing very quickly. The environmental issues that we covered in our environmental review that in turn led to the EIS are the conventional resource areas that are evaluated traditionally for all nuclear facilities. But we did have a very specific sort of set of constraints around how we wanted to select a site. We worked through that site selection process that's expected as part of the NEPA review as well. And it was very good sort of synergy between our site selection process and the process that's expected as part of the environmental review. I'll pose one more question for whomever wants to take it and then we'll turn to some audience questions. The NRC is a unique and complex regulatory environment to navigate. EEPA is its own complexity and ever-changing nature. And so from my perspective, part of the environmental justice equation is also ensuring procedural justice because it's hard for a regular person, a small community nonprofit or a smaller tribal community to have the bandwidth and knowledge for how to navigate all this stuff. And when you don't know how to, when you don't know the roadmap to follow and leverage the procedure, then you'll often go look for the biggest hammer you can find and use that one because you're just frustrated and want it to stop until you can figure out what's going on or get someone on your side. So anyone who wanna comment on how we can improve or how we address procedural justice in terms of helping communities understand what their abilities are so they can feel like they're part of the process? I can start to just in speaking a little bit more about what we've done in our proposed rule on engagement and environmental justice. A big part of that is making sure agencies are thinking critically about the populations so that their notifications are going out in a range of ways, in a range of languages. If that's applicable, one piece in the proposed rule is that an agency can designate an engagement officer. Chris mentioned CERPO, which is Chief Environmental Review Officer. So it's sort of the CERPO's equivalent for engagement for environmental reviews so that there's a specific person in an agency thinking about that. So we see, as you said a number of times, I mean, there are stories about really complex projects with sort of long timelines and each of those tend to have a fairly unique story about why they took so long. But when you look at complex projects that have moved through in a fairly timely way, they all have the common denominator of good public engagement. And some of those that have been turned around from a long period, it's because there was a new opportunity to have public engagement that really helped move a project forward. We'll send. Commissioner, can I come in on that one? Yeah, so we've talked a lot about engagement. I think one of the, maybe a silver lining to the whole COVID experience was looking at the value of in-person engagement. We have been able to take advantage of hybrid meetings and virtual meetings to reach some folks that we may not have been able to reach otherwise. But the flip side of that also is that for community, environmental justice communities that don't necessarily have things like internet access, that the in-person engagements when we hold public meetings near the site or in the vicinity or with the communities that are affected to talk about these issues and to help them understand the processes, what we do, why we do it and the issues at stake and to listen to what they have to say is extremely valuable. So that in-person, face-to-face is something that we're really learning to take advantage of to address those issues and kind of help understand what the dynamics are like locally in those kind of communities. Okay, thanks. Anybody else want to add on to that, please? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I was just gonna say meeting people where they are and talking to them, like real human beings. I've been at a couple of NRC public meetings where the public is commenting a lot of times they're just asking questions but the NRC is not allowed to answer any of those questions and that's another frustrating experience where someone has taken the time out of their day to come and try to get some information about this project that is being proposed and it's not an NRC project but they don't necessarily understand that and it's just this one way, it's not a conversation, it's just a one way outpouring of seeking something that they're not able to get and there are again structural reasons for that but it is not necessarily very satisfying. So actually being able to have a conversation with someone where some of your questions can get answered is incredibly invaluable. Yeah, Green, Peter. I think that's a, it's a really insightful question and maybe this part of the conversation makes it worth the plane ticket for me because just the title of this session which includes increasing transparency. My initial reaction to that as an industry guy is, what do you mean increased transparency? Because for those that don't know, most of you here know, but the default for NRC engagement is it's public. Every meeting, every letter, every email is public unless I sign an affidavit declaring and demonstrating that it's proprietary. There's countless opportunities for public engagement in meetings. The staff does, I think, a good job at standing up when the process starts, public meetings describing here's what the process is gonna look like, here's your opportunities to engage. The public has the opportunity to submit contentions, propose contentions and request a contested hearing. The public has an opportunity to provide comments on the draft EIS when it's issued. The public has the opportunity to approach the commissioner of the staff at any time on any subject. And so how much more should we pander to the public? That's my first reaction. But it's a really good point that if somebody wants to engage and doesn't know everything I just said, then they're just gonna be frustrated, right? And that's where the opportunity for a little bit more or maybe a little bit different level of communication to prospective stakeholders, which we try to do as the applicant, but the agency could do as well to say 90% of the people in this room know what I just said. For the 10% of you who don't, let's talk about it. Let's make sure you understand the process as for engagement. This isn't an opportunity. We're not inviting people to submit 4,000 identical comments on a draft EIS, but if you're genuinely interested and wanna engage, here's the opportunity to do that. And if you don't understand it, let's go talk in the corner and we can help you out. And it's that 10% that maybe the ones that end up intervening or suing or just having a bad taste in their mouth about government working for their people and then it has an outsize impact for 10% of the population and we all struggle with it. Anna, you wanna add? Yeah, I was just gonna add in response to both of those last two comments. We have other new energy industries that are standing up, Offshore Wind is a big one and there the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has undertaken a number of things on the East Coast that are a little more, they're kind of like a science fair setup, so they're sort of stations that allows the public to sort of flow through, be able to ask boom experts about various things that they have questions about or didn't know, the feedback from those activities is that's been a really helpful way for the public to get the questions they had answered and realize they had some other questions and understand those other things. So I think across the government, agencies are trying to think about what are the ways that we can help educate people in rather than just sort of hearing from them. And those efforts aren't necessarily project specific you're saying, but they're just kind of like agency or sub-agency 101 out. They tend to be, they do tend to be project specific, so there will be a project or projects that will be being developed off that coast, but it provides an avenue to talk about some of the broader issues around it. I'm gonna take my moderator prerogative and make one more comment on something Peter said and then we really will turn to the audience. This issue of how can we become more transparent? I've been chewing on that since I got to the NRC because something wasn't squaring on that for me because the NRC is extraordinarily transparent. In fact, to a fault, I would almost say, I think the shortcoming is it's transparency without context. And if folks don't understand the context for which all this stuff is being made public or available, they're not gonna know what to do with it. Voluminous, it's everywhere. And so like some context and organization, user-friendly organization that goes along with that transparency could go a long way. I mean, I'm not as smart as all of you, but I'm not dumb and I've been doing it for a while and I have a hard time navigating NRC's website to find things that I would want. And so it's those things that we gotta think about. Let's turn to the audience, Dave, or whoever. Do you wanna show us yours? So tee something up. Thank you, we'll do. The first question is for Ms. Snyder. It's a question about state implementation of NEPA-like requirements. The question is, as NEPA implementation changes at the federal level, what is the prospect of corresponding changes to state equivalent environmental policy acts? And how might these changes affect NRC agreement state programs? I'm embarrassed to admit that's a little outside of my area of expertise. Anna, do you know? I can't speak to the NRC piece, but obviously there are a lot of state-level NEPA type of equivalents. We agency, we have a number of things, guidance and other type of products that help harmonize state environmental review processes with NEPA, that actually is another aspect of the FRA amendments to help facilitate that further. So there already is a focus and an attempt to harmonize with the federal and the state review processes. Much like at the federal level, there's an increased focus on permitting issues. So there's been a number of state changes that have happened. California had one. I think Michigan has adopted one. So there is a lot of activity at the state level happening on state level permitting to. And our goal is always to try and work towards some of that harmonization. Sometimes the new stuff is actually gonna add some wrinkles. We've had a couple of questions from agencies because of the new requirements like page limits is impacting some of their requirements at the state level. So we're trying to iron out those type of situations as they arise. Next. Okay, there were a number of questions pertaining to NRC's use of generic environmental impact statements. I'm going to provide some context around that for the audience, but then I think, Chris, the question will go to you first, but it touches on others. NRC, where we've seen that the environmental impacts are likely to be the same over and over at different sites for the same type of activity, we've prepared a number of generic environmental impact statements, whether it's for decommissioning nuclear power reactors or licensed renewal of power reactors that there are NRC generic environmental impact statements. So some of the questions pertain to potential future geyses. For example, for reuse of coal sites, coal-fired electric generating plant sites for new nuclear, is that something the NRC is doing? Go ahead. My crystal ball is not quite that clear, but there is certainly something to be said for the benefits of generating a generic environmental impact statement that dispositions those generic issues, category one issues, and kind of takes them off the table, which can result in more efficient NRC's NEPA reviews in environmental space, but also allows the staff to focus on those category two issues that are unique to a particular site. So, has there been thought about a generic environmental impact statement for brownfield sites or old coal-fired power plant sites, not specifically, but depending on the nature of the reactor that might be placed on that site, there could be benefit to leveraging the generic environmental impact statements, which we may have in place at that time. So, but yeah, the benefits of a generic environmental impact statement really are very helpful to our effectiveness and our efficiency of conducting our environmental reviews, for sure. And Anna, there was one question to you pertaining to CEQ's views on the use of generic environmental impact statements. I don't think I can speak to the use of generic ones, but I do want to thank you all for coming here rather than the competing AI-focused session. But that is another place in the Fiscal Responsibility Act directed CEQ to look at digital innovations. And I think there's a huge body of knowledge in the collective environmental impact statements that the federal government has written. They're all on EPA's website. And the University of Arizona has actually taken all of those and developed something called NEPA Access so that folks can go in and put in some keyword and get returned EIS information across years agencies that have touched on that. So I think there is, we're on the cusp of being able to have some additional digital tools available for agencies to pull on that body of knowledge. And that will be especially helpful with agencies needing to look at the cumulative impact of things or one place, another action in a certain geographic area can draw upon that existing knowledge there. So that is actually part of my work that I'm most excited about is how we can bring in more of the modern digital tools that we all are used to using to help our permitting work across the government. It's a good point. And there's a, I don't know if it's an irony but it's an interesting tidbit that AI can potentially help solve parts of these problems or at least provide some higher degree of analytical rigor and maybe some efficiencies therein. But the better AI gets them, that's dependent on how much data you have and the crunch more data, you need more energy. And so you may need carbon-free nuclear to power that AI that then facilitates it. So there's a cyclical element here that hopefully will be mutually beneficial but we'll see. Dave, are there more questions? There are more questions. I'm gonna stay on guys just for one more question for Chris. Can you give us an update on the advanced nuclear reactor guys? It's currently with the commission and we're awaiting a waiting commission direction on what to do next. Thank you, Chris. That would be you. I voted already. All right, better move on. For Peter, from an applicant's perspective, can you explain the potential difficulty of going through NEPA for every single reactor, especially once Cairo starts deploying multiple advanced reactors? How does, how do NEPA requirements impact Nth of a kind deployments? Great question. And actually very similar to the guy's question. You know, in terms of sort of bespoke plants and one of a kind applications, given the long history of demonstrably positive environmental impact from nuclear, particularly as measured against climate change and in comparison with fossil plants that don't have to go through NEPA, if the environmental review gets even close to critical path against the safety review then we're doing it wrong, right? When it comes to standard designs, where the safety review should be pretty quick, it's incumbent on us to try to look for those innovations and improvements to make the environmental review quick also. And talked with some folks earlier today about what are the opportunities to make a plant design as site agnostic as possible that speeds up the safety review, look for opportunities within the guise to make the environmental review for a specific site as quick and as painless as possible, take full advantage of the fact that these plants are licensed and permitted. So all of the resource areas under which those permits apply, one should be able to presume under the rule of reason that they're gonna operate within their permits or their licenses or they're gonna be promptly mitigated to within compliance. So the closer we get to standardized designs where the safety review is site agnostic and just a cookie cutter from the one that was just done, then the site specific engineering contribution to the safety review is gonna begin to emerge as potential critical path in the environmental review could begin to emerge as close to critical path, not because it's taking longer than the safety review but because the safety review has gotten quick. So that's where we're gonna have to be creative and innovative and look for the kinds of innovations that we've helped identify with the support of the staff and keep doing more of the same because we're not gonna be able to keep up otherwise. Let me add on to that and tee something up for probably either Chris or Peter. In the context of efficiencies to be gained in the NEPA context, some of these statutory changes about page limits and timelines play a role. But they can also present a challenge if the quality of the inputs on the front end aren't great and either Chris or Peter, talk about what it, I guess Chris to start with. The quality of the submission of the information you get from the applicant makes all the difference in how quickly and thoroughly you can do your job, right? Yeah, it's kind of like painting, right? 99% of the end product is in the preparation. So these pre-application engagements that we strongly encourage from applicants to identify the issues, ensure there's a common shared understanding of what is necessary when the application is submitted, such that when it's submitted, there's minimal issues, that it's all in the preparation and the pre-application. And we try very hard to encourage that pre-application to ensure we get the right information in the right format and that it's a quality submittal. Yeah, and I think applicants who think they can just dump a bunch of stuff on the agency and the agency will shine it up or help them sort it out. It's not the agency's job none of us, the agency's have the bandwidth to do that. And so, I encourage applicants for the sake of efficiency as well as thoroughness to make sure that you provide a good product on the front end. I know we've been going on for a while and Dave, unless there's any really burning question in there, I was just gonna let the panelists give any last remarks if that's okay. I think that's it with the questions. Okay, fair enough. Let's start, Chris, and come down to Anna with any last comments and you don't feel obligated, but if you have anything to close with, please do. I'll keep it short, thanks, Commissioner. This is unprecedented change. I talked about our blueprint for how we're going to manage all the changes, the workload, knowledge management, staffing, resources, expertise, external engagement, internal communications, changes to our regulatory framework. All of this is occurring concurrently and it's a lot of change, but the opportunities to make the NEPA process better, more streamlined, more efficient, it's all there. We just need to put the pieces together and execute. Thanks, Melanie. Yeah, I would say the states are largely interested in helping things happen. They just want to protect the safety and the environments which they are responsible. And if there's a way that we could be better involved in the process, they're definitely open to those ideas. Thank you. I'll agree with everything that's been said. I've been doing this a long time and I never thought I would see the environment as ripe as it is for real progress as we see today. Politically, at the community level, grassroots support, startling amount of bipartisan bicameral support. NEPA is just a microcosm of the larger sort of compelling pull for what is a world-saving technology. Yeah, I think I've got major geopolitical drivers as well at the same time. Anna? Sure, I would just close with, for most of my career, I've been focused on how we advance climate policy, get the type of investments that we now see coming through the infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act. And so that has pivoted to, okay, what are the other things that we need to overcome in order to make this transition to a clean economy, to meet the president's climate and clean energy goals. And so that has really focused on permitting aspects. This administration is focused in working a whole of government. I haven't said that yet, so I'll probably get chided for not saying that earlier, but it really, the administration is really taking that approach. I and I work across the government and the White House complex to really advance those. But I think just to underscore the comments that you just made, Commissioner, it really is gonna take everybody, both agencies working hand in hand with project developers and then together working with those communities to make sure that we can build the infrastructure we need in the timeframe that we need to address the climate crisis. So thank you all for what you're doing to try and achieve that. And unfortunately, we don't have a whole lot of time. The time is now to do these things. We're overdue and that applies in the climate context or the energy security context. Take your pick. We need to take the same actions for the same reasons. Thank you all for participating and for your unique insights. I found it helpful. I hope all of you found it helpful at some level. And if there were specific things that you had put in the hopper to ask or just had thought of to ask, I'm sure we can help track down any one of us for further conversations or questions at some point. But thank you all. I appreciate it. It's been a long day for everyone in this room, including yourselves, so we will adjourn. Thank you.