 So, the commission meets today to discuss the NRC staff review and recommendations regarding expedited transfer of spent nuclear fuel from pools into dry storage casks at reactors. Over the last few decades, the NRC has examined the risk of potential spent fuel pool fires from severe accidents. This issue is important because the spent fuel pools contain a significant cesium source term and don't have the benefit of containment structures. Although spent fuel becomes significantly cooler after the first few months of discharge into the pool, there's still a period of time when it may be vulnerable to potential self-ignition, regeneration of hydrogen and significant release of cesium if the cooling water were lost from the pool. Now, the physics of self-ignition during a drain down event is very complicated and the arrangement of the hottest fuel in the pool in the racks is one factor in this event, potential event. Now, after 9-11 in particular, many organizations and the public have raised concerns about the vulnerability of spent fuel pools to fires and terrorist attacks. And now after Fukushima, concerns have been rekindled again. The staff has recently completed a consequence study based on the spent fuel pool at the peach bottom reactor and, in addition, a more recent regulatory analysis that analyzes the need for expedited transfer of all spent fuel from U.S. pools into dry casks, not all fuel but of a certain age. The staff has delivered a paper to the commission that recommends that expedited transfer is not warranted and that the NRC needs not pursue any further generic assessments in this area. So the commission today is interested in hearing from the staff on the findings of their consequence study and expedited transfer analysis for all spent fuel pools. In addition, we're also interested in hearing from external groups and we're going to hear today from both industry and non-governmental organizations as well. So let me first say that I'm going to ask each of you panelists to keep your remarks to, I believe, 10 minutes. We have a great deal to talk about today. So please pay attention to the timing lights in front of you. And I ask you also to try to avoid using acronyms. To the extent possible, we'll allow NRC, but the public is watching this and we want to make this as accessible as possible. So what we'll do is we'll have our first panel and then we'll have a short break and then we'll hear from the staff. In the next 40 minutes, we'll discuss the results of the staff's analysis and recommendation for the Fukushima lessons learned issue on expedited transfer or spent fuel. I want to note it represents substantial work for the staff. That work was not done in a vacuum. It was done with considerations. They called their input and with extensive interaction with the ACRS. And also it was conducted consistent with the agency's processes and practices. For our presentation today, Jennifer Yule, who is the Deputy Director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, will provide a background in overview. Brian Sharon, who is the Director of the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, will overview the spent fuel pool study. I'm also joined by several staff members who perform the analysis that we are discussing today, Hussein Ismaili, who is a Senior Reactor Systems Engineer in the Office of Research, and Jose Perez, who's a Senior Technical Advisor for Civil and Structural. We'll talk about, we'll highlight the spent fuel study approach and results. And Fred Schofer, who is responsible for the regulatory analysis in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, will discuss that aspect. Slide three, please. Before Jennifer begins, I want to note that the effort was brought, even though the effort was brought in depth, we focused really on answering several basic questions. And in our presentation, we'll discuss those answers in detail. And the slide that is up summarizes the results. The questions are, first, is the storage of fuel and spent fuel pools safe? And the answer is yes. Fukushima and other operating experience, the most recent study, as well as previous studies all support and do not undermine our conclusion that spent fuel pool storage or storage of spent fuel and pools provides reasonable assurance of adequate protection. And although we didn't consider them in our analyses, the safety results or the safety benefits that came from the March 2012 orders and requests for information, further strengthen our confidence in the level of safety provided. Second question, would expedited transfer of fuel to achieve low density storage and spend fuel pools be safer? The answer is yes, arguably, and we'll explain what we mean by that, but the answer is yes. But the third question and the more important question is, would the increase in safety as a result of expedited transfer of fuel be significant or substantial? And the answer to that is no. As we'll discuss, the increase in safety will be small compared to the increase considered by the commission to warrant an added increment in protection above adequate protection. So the increment would be small. Said another way, the staff believes that the increment of added safety would be small such that additional regulatory action is not warranted. The final question, would the increase likely be justified in light of the added cost? Again, no. You will hear, as you will hear in the presentation, we conclude based on our analysis that use conservative assumptions that were intended to maximize the benefit of low density storage that the increase in safety would not be just cost justified, and the ACRS agrees. With that, again, we'll touch on those points as we go through the presentation. I'd like to turn to Jennifer to begin the presentation. Thanks, Mike. First, I want to verify that everyone is on slide number four. An important point to keep in mind today as we discuss this topic is that the agency has a long history of studying the issue of spent fuel storage safety. The work began in the 1970s when the need to provide additional storage of fuel beyond the original pool storage capacity was first analyzed. The staff evaluated the high density pool storage and issued regulatory guidance for its review. The reviews demonstrated that such storage was safe and that onsite storage was allowed through license amendment processes. The staff evaluated high density storage as a generic safety issue in the 1980s to evaluate changes in the staff understandings of the events affecting the storage pools. And again, in the late 1990s in relation to establishing appropriate requirements for decommissioning phase of plan operations. A series of assessments were then performed following the events of September 11th, and it led to a number of changes. One is enhanced capabilities to model spent fuel response to the loss of coolant from the pool, which we took advantage of when performing these analyses. And secondly, regulatory changes involving loading patterns and mitigating strategies that were ultimately codified in 10 CFR 5054HH. Following the Fukushima accident, the staff undertook the spent fuel pool study in the office of research. And we'll discuss that in more detail later. And then finally, the evaluation of possible regulatory actions. And we had documented this evaluation in Comsecchi 1300030, which of course was provided to the commission in November. So slide five, please. So going back to a bit of history, during the events of Fukushima, the staff and external stakeholders raised questions on the safety of spent fuel pools, especially since the spent fuel pools at Fukushima had high density storage. At Fukushima, excuse me, this issue was more so on everyone's mind in the early days of the accident when reliable information about the pool status was not available. And there were several questions raised about the integrity of the spent fuel pools after the hydrogen explosion in the Unit 4 reactor building. Although subsequent inspections confirmed that the pools remain intact and that the stored fuel was not damaged, the staff nevertheless proposed an item to be added to the Tier 3 list of Fukushima actions to look at any benefit associated with expediting transfer of fuel to the dry casks. In May 2013, the staff decided to complete this assessment to support the waste, excuse me, the public interactions on the waste confidence decision, although the waste confidence decision did not rely solely on the Tier 3 activity. So, next slide, excuse me, the second bullet on this slide. The staff develop a plan involving three phases. Comsecchi 130 provided the results of the Phase 1 assessment which is to help determine if an additional study should be conducted. If the results of the Phase 1 study justify that we need to do additional work, then phases 2 and 3 of the program plan would be conducted to refine those analyses to determine whether or not any regulatory action is warranted. So as we will discuss here today, the Phase 1 assessment is more or less a screening evaluation. It used conservative assumptions to bias the results towards proceeding to Phase 2. We think that more study would show even more strongly that regulatory actions are not needed in this area and that therefore our recommendation is that we close this issue without further actions or research. Slide 6, please. Specifically as part of the Phase 1 work, the staff prepared a regulatory analysis of expedited transfer spent fuel to dry cast storage using our well-established processes. Specifically, those are regulatory analysis guidelines that are documented in New Reg BR 0058. Please show fur to my left. We'll be discussing this in more detail later in his presentation. The staff relied on information from the past several studies. The October 2013 spent fuel pool study done by the Office of Research as well as operating experience to conduct the analysis. The staff used conservative values in the analysis of several parameters to ensure that design, operational and other site variations amongst the new and operating reactor fleet were addressed. Although the assessment determined that the proposed alternative did not provide a sufficient safety benefit, the staff took the additional step to do some cost-benefit assessments so that the commission would have additional information available for their decision-making process. We believe both the safety goal and the cost-benefit assessment support our recommendation that additional study of this issue is not needed. In its recent letter to the commission, the advisory committee and reactor safeguards agreed with the staff's recommendation. Slide seven, please. This figure here you'll see throughout the rest of the presentation shows the overall approach and how the staff's activities build upon each other. As Brian Sharon will discuss as well as his staff, the spent fuel pool study that's depicted in more detail, just the yellow or tan section, is included a detailed analysis of what would occur at a particular spent fuel pool or what we call the reference plant under a severe seismic event. And use plant-specific data to evaluate the potential for the pool to be uncovered, the fuel to be uncovered, and then to determine whether or not that would result in releases from the fuel, and if so the consequences in terms of public health and safety. So the spent fuel pool included a regulatory analysis for the reference plant in what we call appendix D to the study, and that's depicted in the green section on the slide. And that used information again from previous studies to address other initiating events and conditions to assess the probabilities and consequences of a release from the spent fuel pool at the reference site. This was necessary because the spent fuel pool study focused only on the extreme seismic event. Using the established guidance for regulatory and back-fit analysis we determined that no additional regulatory action would not be pursued, typically, and that there was not substantial safety benefit associated with removing older spent fuel from the spent fuel pool for that reference plant. However, it was a reference plant and it did not represent the variations across the entire fleet of reactors and spent fuel pools. So the regulatory analysis that was provided in the Comsecchi, and it's depicted in the purple section on the slide, broadens the scope yet again to address the whole fleet with various plant and pool designs, various initiating events and other variables to support a generic regulatory analysis of the fleet. Fred Schofer is the staff expert who conducted the study, the regulatory analysis aspect, and we'll discuss this later in his presentation.