 It's a pleasure to be here and it's a pleasure to combine the seminars from CSAC with the energy seminar from pre-court. I want to start by pointing out that we've just passed the 75th anniversary of the Chicago Pile 1 experiment where Enrico Fermi and his colleagues demonstrated it was possible to have a sustained chain reaction. This is a painting that depicts this historic event and this was really the culmination of all the exciting physics that took place early in the 20th century. It was a crude reactor but still large enough, some 45,000 carbon blocks for the moderator, some five metric tons of uranium and 45 metric tons of U02 as the fuel. This was just over 75 years ago and I put this up because I'm sure at this historic moment in physics no one said, well, what about the waste? There was so much excitement that this idea worked and of course this was quite an important development because this led then to the creation of the plutonium production reactors at Hanford and then at Savannah River. Harold did the beginning of the use of nuclear reactions for generating power and so this was a big moment but people weren't thinking about the waste. Now in fact there were waste, CP1 was disassembled and moved to a site not too far away from the present location of Argonne National Laboratory. It was decided that perhaps having such a nuclear reactor so close to downtown Chicago wasn't the most prudent approach so it was moved. Reassembled as CP2, there were series of reactors and in fact at this site A, plot M, the material from the reactor or at least part of the material from the reactor is buried. So this was in fact some of the waste and its ultimate fate going back 75 years ago. This was the subject of a clean-up, a modest clean-up which took several tens of millions of dollars. This is at Redgate Woods, I think it's called, just a five minute drive from the present Argonne National Laboratory. More interesting is building 51 of the Melanchrot chemical works which were located essentially in downtown St. Louis. It was in this building that the rich uranium ore from the Belgian Congo was processed and generated some 40 metric tons of uranium for family's CP1. This processing facility continued to operate until 1957 and the residues from this processing actually moved around the local area of St. Louis. Some fraction were stored at the airport for a while and I'm not sure of the entire story but in fact some portion of this waste ended up in a landfill in North St. Louis County and that landfill is on fire, an underground fire and you can imagine there's some concern from the local community. In fact you don't need to imagine that concern. There's a very nice HBO documentary, Atomic Home Front, which traces the history of this landfill issue, radioactivity in the landfill and how the communities have struggled to deal with the clean-up. So I think for me what's very important to realize is that I went to the University of Chicago and participated in the celebration of CP1. At that time I didn't realize that some of the waste is still confounding the efforts of local communities in St. Louis and that people still struggle with this waste. Now that was the first step, CP1 was very small, it operated at less than a watt but we had an extensive weapons program with plutonium production reactors, reprocessing to reclaim that plutonium. In 1957, Shipping Port power plant came online, first commercial nuclear power plant and we began to, as a country, create, used or spent nuclear fuel as a waste product of the fuel cycle. So the scale of this experiment is small but what followed later was huge. I found it doesn't do much good to give you the numbers in curies or cubic meters or gallons or normal metrics but dollars perhaps are closer to your hearts when you're making comparisons. And we can consider, roughly speaking, that the Department of Energy's budget is about 30 billion dollars, most recently it's a little higher. In that 30 billion, if we set aside the 12 billion that goes to NNSA, essentially the weapons program, this leaves 18 billion dollars in the Department of Energy's budget left to do whatever a Department of Energy should do, that is look into alternative sources of energy, do the work, the research and the development and provide the support for developing alternative or new energy resources. So that's 18 billion dollars but when we look at the Department of Energy's budget you'll see 6 billion for environmental management. Environmental management is that part of DOE that's dealing with the legacy waste from our defense programs. So that's one third of let's say the usable budget for energy and that 6 billion dollars is more than the budget for the Office of Science. The Office of Science is the largest supporter of research for the physical sciences in the United States, larger than the NSF and yet we spend more money working on finding solutions for this defense waste. That says nothing about the waste generated by nuclear power plants. We'll come to that in a moment. Could you ask me questions at the end? I appreciate it. I'll look forward to your questions at the end. So with this in mind what I want to present to you today is the result of a series of meetings that occurred at Stanford and in one meeting at George Washington University where we tried to identify particular issues that were very important to getting the US nuclear waste management program back on track. The meetings occurred over a nearly two year period. We were very fortunate to have support from pre-court, also support from the Friedman Spogli Institute for International Studies and support from CSAC to conduct these meetings. And this allowed us to bring in experts from essentially all over the world and in this series of five meetings we had 75 presentations and lots of time for interaction and discussion. And there's let's say a longer description of the purpose for these meetings but the short description is we wanted to understand why the US program is not advanced and we wanted to try to avoid that in 20, 30, or 40 years we're still discussing the same issues. That is to identify the way forward. Now the US program is represented in my mind by this Gordy and Nott. The program is ever-tightening. We've arrived at this state due to major changes in the original law of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982. Slowly developing and changing regulatory framework, erratic funding, significant changes in policy with changing administrations, conflicting congressional and executive policies. And finally inadequate public engagement in decisions about fundamental strategies for the storage, transportation and disposal of the nuclear waste. Now there are many strands in this knot. One could focus on the implementer, the Department of Energy or on the regulator, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or on the states which are either against receiving a repository or perhaps want to have a repository. But I want to emphasize really everyone in this field, including myself, has contributed to this knot. Now my main role has been in a researcher, let's say far removed as a researcher, far removed from the policy. But in fact as I look back I think that the researchers, including myself, have focused too much on what I call just the piecemeal science. We have a small contract, we measure the solubility of thorium in certain conditions. We haven't been following our data and our thoughts into the safety analysis. We haven't really contributed as much as we should have to thinking about the conceptual problems of nuclear waste management and disposal. Now why does the United States find itself in this current situation? There's a very long list but just some high points. First, managing the spent fuel in a high level waste wasn't a high priority. In the earliest days during the Cold War it was more important to produce weapons than to worry about the waste. And also there was real optimism associated with nuclear power and I would say a naive belief that it would be easy to dispose of the used fuel. Or that that used fuel would be reprocessed. In the earliest days reprocessing was part of the plan and reprocessing was considered to be a strategy which would reduce the waste problem. Also there was a technical fix, could be envisioned. The simplest technical fix in terms of the reprocessing associated with nuclear weapons was just to build enormous tanks and put the high level waste into the tanks and leave it. And if the tank leaked or if we needed more storage space build additional tanks. And that was the fix for a long time. In 19, well and then the Atomic Energy Commission did begin to worry about it. So they commissioned a study of the National Academy of Sciences which in 1957 endorsed the idea of geologic disposal. There's a very nice report criteria. It looks like something that can be done. And so this report added to the idea or the feeling that technical fixes were available. Now as time passed it turned out that the technical fix was not as easy as expected. The tanks leaked as an example. It's difficult to detect the tanks when they're leaking. Probably more important in 1969 there was a fire at Rocky Flats. And that fire caused the Atomic Energy Commission to think more seriously about what are our options? Where are we going to put the waste? Because a large amount of the waste from Rocky Flats was sent to Idaho with a promise to the governor of Idaho that 10 years later that waste would be sent to another location. And so one needed another location. That was in the early 70s and late 70s. There was an interagency group that very carefully considered what might be done. And this led to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 which was really a grand covenant. There was a lot of interaction, a lot of different ideas, a lot of give and take. And it plotted the path forward for the US program. The difficulty is that almost immediately some of these key bargains began to unravel. One of the most important elements of this bargain was that the site selection for a repository would be technically driven and involve the comparison of at least three possible sites. In the period between 1982 and 1987 this site selection process went from nine to five and finally to three sites that were placed under active investigation. But in 1987 Congress, let's say frustrated by the cost of characterizing three sites when you only need one, decided on Yucca Mountain as the site for further investigation. Another element of the difficulty is that yesterday's solutions have become today's problems. This is a quote from a DOE colleague who prefers to remain anonymous. But it's very interesting to consider how along the way things were done that looked like solutions. An example would be the removal of cesium and strontium from the waste in the Hanford tanks. So now we have several thousand pipes, capsules of cesium and strontium that were separated from the high level waste at Hanford. This was probably a good idea and I've always been impressed by the fact that it could be done and was done. But it creates a new waste stream and these capsules are in pools in storage at Hanford and represent yet another issue that has to be dealt with. Another type of solution, particularly in the late 80s and through the 90s, was to enter into agreements with states about the fate of the waste on their site. So most famous would be the 1989 agreement, the triparty agreement between the state of Washington, EPA and DOE which deals with what to do with the waste at Hanford. Well, at the moment this was signed in 1989, it looked like progress. But that schedule was very specific about what would be done and when and what penalties might accrue to DOE if they didn't finish the work on time. Another agreement in 1995, DOE agreed with the state of Idaho that in 40 years all of the spent fuel would be removed from the state of Idaho. Well, 1995 were pretty far along to the 2035 date when that's supposed to happen. And so the solutions became actually a web of agreements that in many ways tied DOE's hands as they tried to look forward to a new solution. And then finally, no geologic repository, central to all of this is a place to put the waste. In 2010, the Obama administration attempted to withdraw the license application unsuccessfully and that took some years in court to determine. But being unsuccessful in withdrawing the license application, funding for the NRC and the DOE to pursue work on Yucca Mountain was not available. And so these are just a few of the items that really blocked progress on nuclear waste management. Now for the reset process, let me say just and very quickly a few words about that. The entire process was driven by a steering committee, a steering committee of people who have extensive experience with nuclear waste management issues. It included people from national laboratories, I have to say, with the change in administration and also change in lab management, they finally had to step off, but they made a very important contribution to the discussions. Probably most important were the international members of the committee, representing Sweden, Canada, and France. We also had then people from academics and Sally Benson from Precord Institute. What I'd say, I added it up, this is over 300 years experience in the nuclear waste field. And so that's just one way to say we in our deliberations weren't limited to what we were told. We didn't enter the discussion as novices, but it guided the discussions and the design of the meetings. The steering committee set the agenda. And at the first meeting, we spend a lot of time trying to determine what are the critical issues. There are so many little issues. We don't want to waste time on those, although they might be very important. What are the most important issues to address? This is the list of important issues, the idea of a new waste management organization, the definition of a consent-based process. I should have said earlier, we benefited greatly from the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, right? So those first two issues come really from their deliberations and their report, which was issued in January of 2012, and thus far there's been no action on those reports. Other issues for the committee were to understand the nuclear waste, the back end of the fuel cycle in the United States, to review how regulations and risk methodology are folded into the concept of safety. And then also very important was the idea of, well, what if we do nothing? We found we didn't know much about the no action option for the U.S. program. And that's a very important starting point. And so we put it on our list, but the open circle means that we didn't get to this subject, and I'll come back to that later. What we did do is organize meetings around each of these items. And for each of the meetings, say in the new organization, I won't read through all of these or even give you time to finish reading them. We would have a series of questions, and then we would invite speakers most appropriate for addressing the questions. For the new organization, that had been, and you'll see in a moment, or I'll describe to you in a moment, it's a topic with a long history. And so we focused on areas that hadn't been covered so thoroughly before, such as what do we mean when we say that an organization should engender trust? What kind of behavior is that? Or if we say an organization doesn't have trust, what do we mean exactly? For the integration of the fuel cycle, we're most interested to understand whether the incentives at every stage were aligned in such a way that you would be led to geologic disposal. And as you'll see as I discuss this, in fact, in the U.S., they're not aligned. And we fragment the problem so that in the United States right now, there's a lot of discussion of extended interim storage. As if that's a solution, but that may be a solution that becomes tomorrow's problem. Public engagement, what does the consent-based process mean? Who gives consent? How do you enter into such an agreement? Most importantly, how do you get out of a consent agreement? How do you withdraw your consent? And what if things change in a big way? What if you have a repository? Everyone's been on board, but the implementer decides, well, I would like to use that repository for an entirely different type of way. This has happened at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. So a process of actually obtaining consent over a 20-year period is now negated by rather rapid changes in the purpose for the repository. That is, it's being changed. And then the critical issues of risk, regulations, and safety. Of course, this is what the public is most interested in. But how do we take risk calculations and convey them to the public and to ourselves in a way that they make sense and make a compelling case? And then, as I mentioned, this issue of the status quo, which we didn't get to, but I want to discuss in a moment. Right, I can discuss everything in a lot of detail, and I want to do that in a moment, but let me just give you what the recommendations are. And then I'll go back through them and give a little bit of history and the thinking of the committee. The first is to create a new nuclear waste management organization. And most importantly, a new funding scheme. I'll come to that in the later discussion. But what's new is the idea that this organization would be utility-owned. And in all of the long history of considering various types of organizations that might deal with the nuclear waste, what finally stood out to the committee is that if we look around the world, say in Canada, Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden, the nuclear waste organization, single-purpose organization, is owned by the utilities. And this has a very important effect because that means that you've aligned all of the decision-making steps within one organization, and they're oriented toward the goal of long-term disposal, that is, geologic repositories. The third conclusion is just the follow-on, that we have to find a way in the U.S. program to align all of the incentives. Right now, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act put into place what's called the Standard Contract, which is an agreement between the Department of Energy and the Utilities about how the fuel will be transferred to the department. But in the absence of a repository and the Department of Energy's failure to take ownership of that fuel and dispose of it in a repository, that leads the utilities to take actions with that fuel on site that may not be aligned with what needs to be done for geologic disposal. We would also recommend revising the regulatory approach, such that the quantitative probabilistic risk analysis is only one element in what we describe as a safety case approach, and this is a very important recommendation, but it'll take me some time to tease out the subtleties of it. And then the final observation is that our recommendation or admonition is that we have to realize with Nuclear Waste Management and Disposal, it's not just a technical issue. This is an issue, whether you like it or not, that also has a huge societal component. And whatever the solution is, it has to be something that communities, states, and the larger politic find acceptable. And I'll dwell on that a little more as we go. Okay, a few words on Nuclear Waste Management Organization. Well, the idea of a new Nuclear Waste Management Organization is not at all new. This is a quote from a very early book on radioactive waste, recommending a radioactive waste authority. Actually, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, established that the federal government would be responsible for the Nuclear Waste, a promulgated regulation by the AEC in 1970, put the federal government in charge of developing a geologic repository. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 tells the Secretary of Energy to look at alternative organizations. And so in 1983, the Secretary of Energy formed AMFM Alternative Management and Financing of the Management of Nuclear Waste. That commission worked for a time, looked at different organizations, FedCorp, private corporations, and so on. Finally, their report wasn't received very well by the Department of Energy, and it was decided well. Even if this is a good idea, let's wait until we're past the site recommendation stage, which we got to in 2002. And the Department of Energy never returned to this subject. The Blue Ribbon Commission went through the process again and decided that the best approach was a FedCorp, as they're called, a federally-chartered corporation wholly owned by the federal government. There's been no action on that in 2012. Actually, a bipartisan committee in Congress submitted legislation that would create a nuclear waste management organization, not a FedCorp, but an independent government agency, and so on. There was no action taken in 2015. It was submitted to Congress again, and again, no action. So it's just by way of saying there's a long history here. Now, what are we recommending? First, it's very important to realize it becomes clearer as we march through the recommendations. Central to the success of the program would be a new, independent, single-purpose national organization. The BRC, the Blue Ribbon Commission, recommended a FedCorp. So I've already said we think there's great value in looking carefully at the possibility of a utility-owned corporation that's responsible for the entire fuel cycle from the generation-spent fuel until its final disposal. There are a lot of elements that are required. Some are on everyone's list that discusses this matter. You must create trust. You have to realize that such a corporation operates over a long period of time. The active process of emplacing waste, that will take over 100 years. There has to be considerable public engagement and scrutiny, regular national and international reviews. What's most interesting for the U.S. case is to think about, well, what nuclear waste? The immediate idea was, well, this new corporation be in charge of everything. The defense waste, the commercially generated spent fuel. The problem with that is the defense waste, it's a huge problem. And the Department of Energy has already entered into a web, and I've described them briefly before, of agreements. And so it would be a horrible thing for a new organization to walk into that web. And so I think the preference of most members of the committee is to say, let the nuclear waste, the new nuclear waste management organization, only deal with commercially generated spent fuel. Because if they were successful with that, that would be a huge accomplishment. That would just be fantastic. And if they are successful, then at a later stage, they could negotiate with the Department of Energy about DOE paying for their high level waste being disposed of in the repository, if that's appropriate. This would also have the curious advantage of giving the U.S. program two programs, one federal dealing with the defense waste, and the other, a utility owned corporation, essentially private, dealing with the commercially generated spent fuel. I'm going to have to move on. Let me just jump down to funding. Some of these points are important, but in some ways they're just words. The funding situation for nuclear waste in the United States is barely describable, okay? Initially, it made sense. There's a fee that the rate payer pays on electricity generated by nuclear power plants, one mil per kilowatt hour. And those fees from the rate payers go into a fund, the nuclear waste fund, from which we then are to develop a repository, transportation systems, and so on. And it's worked. The fund has accumulated well over $32, $35 billion worth of fees. And with interest now, it's at $40 billion, over $40 billion. The problem is, and I have to refer to my notes because in some ways it's just difficult to believe, the problem is in the 1980s, the Graham-Rodman Hollings Act, 1985, treated the waste, nuclear waste fund as income, and charged it against the national debt, okay? And so it's in the mandatory part of the budget, where there are mandatory expenditures. There were amendments to the Graham-Rodman Hollings Act, as well as the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act, such that they all combine, mean that if you want to increase the budget, say for repository research, in order to maintain a balanced budget, then you have to reduce something else in the Department of Energy's budget. Even though the ratepayers have already put all the money in, okay? And so maybe you're in a construction phase and you want to really spend money, get it done. Well, then the Department of Energy would have to cut some other part of its budget in order to provide for that increase, okay? This essentially means that the funding is erratic, it's not sufficient. And it doesn't scale to what projects experience, that is maybe low levels of funding required early. But then when you start building something, you expect to have more funds available, okay? So the new organization, if it were entirely in utilities, of course, they could take that fee and put it into, as they do in Sweden, what they call a lockbox so that the money is still there. But also our recommendation is to transfer to the new organization over a period of 25 years the Nuclear Waste Fund. So that money which has been collected for waste disposal can be made available. Okay, integration of the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, okay? This, in the 1970s, this is a recent diagram. This is what everyone expected to happen, okay? You would march around the nuclear fuel cycle. You would have your power plant, fuel would go into storage maybe for five years, high level waste from reprocessing, which the US no longer does, would accumulate. And the reason I like this is it illustrates part of the problem is there's no geologic repository. The geologic repository is part of the fuel cycle, but it's often been an afterthought as if we can create it and everything will just flow in on schedule. What's happened for the US, of course, is the used fuel from power plants, the high level waste from defense programs are accumulating at sites all over the country. And it has no place to go. This is the failure of integration. Now, what's the scale of the problem? Well, if all of the US right now has 99 nuclear power plants, they generate around 2,200 metric tons of used fuel per year. If all of the power plants that are scheduled for license extensions, if every power plant gets to its end of life, the total inventory will be close to 140,000 metric tons of fuel. Because the pools at the reactor sites where the fuel was initially stored are filling, this means then fuel has to go into dry cask storage. And over time as pools are shut down and the fuel goes in dry cask storage. Finally, at the end, we will have some 9,000 dry cask storage canisters around the country in approximately 70 different sites. Let me just go on, I just want to give you some examples of what happens if we don't integrate the fuel cycle. A technical example of some of the problems is that we have already 14 shut down sites where there's spent fuel on the site but no operating reactor. But of those 14 sites, eight have already decommissioned their fuel handling facilities. So the possibility of repackaging, putting things into smaller packages with frozen in time, the options, right? And that situation will only grow with time. The economic penalty we pay is because the Department of Energy was not able to take ownership of the fuel on January 31st, 1998. The utilities have sued the Department of Energy successfully and they now receive about a half a billion dollars a year to cover the cost of their having to hang on to the fuel. If nothing changes over the next 10 years, the extrapolation is that will go to something like 23, 25 billion dollars of expense. It comes out of the Judgment Fund, which has seemingly no limit. Social impact, all of the communities with the stranded fuel sites. There's an environmental impact, you can't do this forever. There's a curious regulatory impact. Previously, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had a waste confidence. And I want to use the word rule, but I think it's a determination, which was used to simply say the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is confident that there will be a repository. And this was part of moving forward with nuclear power plants. But this was challenged in court after repeated delays. How confident can you be? And so now there's a waste storage rule which essentially consists of a generic analysis that says in 60 years and 160 years and even beyond there's not much environmental impact. That may or may not be true, people argue about that. But what's certain is that type of ruling removes any incentive to go from storage to disposal. And so you see the US system kind of breaking into parts where each part will continue as is without getting to the final goal of disposal. For the nuclear industry, their implications as an example, let's say we're moving fuel. Originally people thought they would move the oldest fuel first. Now people say, well, let's move the hottest fuel or let's move the fuel at the stranded sites. That's the higher priority because it costs so much to secure those sites. From a geologic point of view, depending on the type of rock, actually none of those options may be what's desired. You may want some mixture of fuels to arrive at a certain temperature. All of this is by way of saying that if we make these decisions separately or separate from one another, then we'll always be less than we should. I'm just watching the clock a little bit. Okay, that's why I flipped through some things. Sorry, public engagement, consent-based siting. Over the last 50 years, there've been 24 efforts to cite a geologic repository. And five had succeeded. And this reference from the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board describes the history of those efforts. And one of the conclusions is that actually to be successful, you need a site that's not only technically suitable, but you need one that's socially acceptable. And the dark areas refer to the time period as you get closer and closer to making a decision. So as you know more about the site, then these circles would decrease. But they've certainly got to overlap. Doesn't matter what you do first, looking at history. You can get a technically acceptable site first or you can take the other route as the Canadians are doing and look for something that's socially acceptable. Public engagement, the two points that have been missed in previous discussions are that the key words are trust and power. The implementer has to have trust and nothing builds trust more than redistributing the power so that everyone has a moment in which they can make their views felt and pass judgment on the acceptability of different strategies. And so what we've proposed is first to realize that consent-based siting is a process. In the US up until now, it's often described as a legally binding contract. Well, we have lots of those with the states and those are now part of the web that's holding everything in place. But in fact, looking at other countries that have been successful with the consent-based process, it's really a process. You have to have early engagement, you're at it all the time. Whether you have an agreement or not, doesn't matter so much. As you're able to communicate with the community, with the state, and change your plans, okay? That's been one of the difficulties in the US program is, we haven't been able to adjust. Now, how would this be done? Looking at other countries, it's not so complicated. It would mean that as an example, a community or a state might have a veto up until a certain point. Say the point where the license application is submitted. They would be an integral part of the site investigation. They would follow along to a certain point, and then their right to veto would disappear when the license operation begins, or the license application process begins. In some countries, the veto exists up until the work goes underground. In other countries, the veto could be at some point during the underground characterization of the repository. A very important point is there are many ways to do it, but this is something that has to be negotiated with the communities. That's an essential part of the process is to get everyone on the same page. And to agree as to how this might be done. Now, there can be a provision to overrule local objections. A typical way to imagine doing this is with a supermajority of both houses of Congress. But then of course you have to define exactly what you mean by supermajority. And in fact, this happened with the old Nuclear Waste Policy Act. When Congress overturned the veto by the state of Nevada for going forward with Yucca Mountain, okay? And if you look at the numbers, I'd forgotten them. I went back and looked last night. Actually, it was a supermajority. If you define supermajority as being 60% of each of the houses of Congress. Okay, I think I've said these things. So let me get on to the last topic, which is the regulations. Now, the regulations in this field are, it's a whole subject unto itself. This is a short list of the major activities, are major points along the way to developing a regulation. I'll simply point out that the NRC was established in 1974 when I got my PhD. Okay, we're down at the end. I'm still talking about nuclear waste. And so this whole process of establishing a regulatory framework has taken my whole career and it's not done yet, okay? That's probably not fast enough if we want to proceed. The other point is that there's some major steps along the way and probably the most important was an Academy report which sets the technical basis for what became the Yucca Mountain Standard. And what I'll simply tell you is the standard has evolved. The original Yucca Mountain Standard was site-specific just for Yucca Mountain. That's important, risk-based. And the compliance period goes out to a million years, okay? And so it's risk-based to a million years. What could that possibly mean, okay? Risk to whom a million years from now? Risk of what, okay? And yet for different reasons, and I think I understand the reasons, following different roads we've converged on pretty difficult requirements for understanding the concept of safety. In fact, the Yucca Mountain Standard remanded several times, and this was the EPA's last effort, and it's still probably subject to discussion in court, has a 50-milli-rem limit the first 10,000 years. But then that jumps to 100-milli-rem, the units don't matter, from 10,000 years to a million years. So go home and try to discuss with your spouse or your children what that might mean in terms of safety. That's one of the critical difficulties. And I'm gonna skip some of the details of explaining how this works for the US and simply say that the recommendation by the committee is to use what's called a safety case approach. Now, this is difficult to discuss because in the US, they picked up on the word safety case and it can mean something different. This is a definition from the IAEA and, sorry, the NEA. But essentially, a safety case approach is multiple lines of evidence, a compelling argument of which among those multiple lines of evidence are the probabilistic risk assessments. Now, why is this important? And I'm not sure I can explain it quickly or concisely enough. The safety case really is a compelling argument. To have a compelling argument, when you select a site, you have to know why you think the site is safe, right? That there's no volcanoes, stable tectonic regime, low movement of water, slow movement of water through the rock units. So the safety case by weaving this compelling argument is one that has to be consistent with, or should be consistent with, the site selection criteria. Also, the safety case approach means that as long as you have a compelling argument, you can reasonably say, well, our calculations out to 100,000 years, that's about as far as we would like to carry that line of argument. That's the limits of our abilities today. But in terms of very long term stability in Switzerland, they even go beyond one million years, we can make strong, qualitative, but compelling arguments for safety. And this has the important effect that it could be then that the regulation in terms of quantitative analysis should be for a relatively short period of time. Or the regulation might say for a relatively short periods of time, no release, right? And there could be a strong deterministic or probabilistic argument to support those statements. But then that would be part of a larger discussion, this compelling argument. Okay, so we're back, I've briefly touched on each of the recommendations. Now let me reflect on them and think about what to do with them. How do we move forward? Well, we could accept the recommendations. It would be a heavy lift, change now and start over for the US. Now that would mean the nuclear utilities would take ownership of the fuel and responsibility for its disposal. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would change the regulatory framework and on and on and on. It's really a heavy lift. But it's probably what's required as we look at other countries and how they have been successful. The heavy lift is probably what's required. But today I don't see Congress taking such deliberate or thoughtful action. The other alternative is, well, let's just do Yucca Mountain, right? The difficulty there is that will be a long and tortuous process. And no matter the outcome, in fact, the DOE's description of this as an unworkable solution, may be right. So we could spend a long time fighting over it. And even if Yucca Mountain became the repository, imposing that on a state, having so much disagreement over decades, somehow that looks like failure, right? That's not really the way one wants to succeed when we cite nuclear facilities. So again, I'm speaking for myself, not for the committee. But thinking about it, there might be another way forward. From our meetings, which I haven't described in any detail, what is very impressive to me is that there is common ground. We went out of our way to invite all of the disparate parties, everyone that I've seen argue with others over one point or another. But they behaved very well. They interacted very well, and we had useful discussions. So it can be that there's common ground. So my modest proposal is, while we're stuck with the inability to change everything at once or an option which may not lead us anywhere, one thing we could do is go back to the fifth recommendation or the fifth thing that the committee didn't get to do. And that is analyze the no option effect for the US program for the next 200 years. The reason this is important is the next 200 years, that's my grandchildren or great grandchildren. I can think about that. This analysis wouldn't be something we would ask the Department of Energy to do the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or any of the institutions, but rather should be funded by a neutral foundation. And it would be an analysis that involves not only the participation of experts and risk analysis, but the many communities that are facing this problem. This would be a collective effort to understand what happens if the US does not do anything for the next 200 years. Map it out. The interactions would be with the state of Nevada, with local communities, with the national laboratories, with university experts and so on. It would be a massive effort, it would take several years. But it would get everyone in the room talking about the same things and perhaps on the same page. And I think what is most important to aspire to for the US program is some common sense approaches to a very complicated program. That is, we have to get people together. We need practice in doing that. The whole system up until now has been adversarial, right? Some of my DOE colleagues and friends say, well, I'm an advocate for Yucca Mountain or I'm an advocate for one safer waste isolation pilot plan. Well, in this process, we don't need advocates. We need people thinking about the problem. And it would also be the opportunity to bring the next generation in to the process because it's clear I'll die before I've accomplished anything in this field. And we've suffered through a lot, I'd like to convey that to the next generation. And I like this photo, these are two students at the reset meeting. Meeting representatives from New Mexico and the state of Nevada just telling them no. And students came to me and said, they just said no, they didn't listen to us. I said, well, that's where we are, that's what's exciting about this field. Your job is not only to be an excellent scientist or engineer, but you have to figure out how to communicate with people who, for good reason in terms of how they've been treated previously, are not very receptive to new ideas. Okay, I've gone over a little bit, but thank you very much.