 Good afternoon. I'd like to welcome you to the open session of the nuclear and radiation studies board My name is will Toby We have a very interesting program ahead of us this afternoon as a reminder to our board members staff Invited speakers and audience the National Academies are committed to the principles of diversity Integrity civility and respect in all our activities all forms of discrimination Harassment and bullying are prohibited in any National Academies activity This applies to all participants in all virtual and in-person meetings in which the National Academies activities are conducted We look to you to be a partner in this commitment by helping us to maintain a professional and cordial environment So once again, I would like to welcome you and And thank you for joining this open session We will begin with a presentation from dr. Paul black Who is the founder and head of neptune and company an environmental consulting company with a mission To improve the quality of environmental decision making through the application of state-of-the-art methods in statistics and data science risk assessment Decision analytics and stakeholder engagement As well as environmental model modeling and quality assurance So with that, I'd like to turn it over to dr. Black Hey, thank you Thanks for the opportunity to present to you all Hopefully you find this interesting we'll see and Thanks to Charles Ferguson who I guess listened to something similar at waste management and asked if I would come and do this here So, hopefully this works for you all Would it be beneficial at all to actually see me talking instead of Having my video turned off. Is there a preference at all? I think so if if it wouldn't be too much of an inconvenience No, no worries. Okay. There we go just Don't have a very interesting background, but that's okay Um, so Darlene, I think you have the presentation and move it forwards Yeah, just uh one moment paul darlene is teeing it up Okay, sounds good Well, I can I can stop While she's teeing it up if you like so there's no silence, but Um, this this is a presentation about Um, something that is currently called structured decision making I'll get into it some but it's the flavor of decision analysis if you like And really the way we think about it at neptune is as an approach to alara And I'll try to tie that together a little bit more as well Um within neptune we started this program in the late 1990s and it was me and one of my colleagues and dr. Tom Stockton and then we Soon grabbed my wife who is now the president of our company kelly black into this as well And as we've grown we've we've got more of our colleagues working in this area So next one, please So, I mean basically what we're trying to do here at least in the world of radioactive contamination is how to make more efficient and cost effective decisions And and perhaps the the first question is why Perhaps that's obvious to a lot of people but The next slide shows the way at least we've been thinking about why is this necessary? So next one so in At the top of this, why do we make disposals so difficult? And as I said at the waste management conference as well I've limited that to three O's because I couldn't fit any more in the title line But we make this incredibly difficult and look I look at this as We have essentially radioactive waste management wagging the nuclear industry dog And if we don't have good disposal options, we're impacting our ability to have a nuclear energy industry So questions that we might ask internally are well, what do we want nuclear energy or fossil fuel nuclear energy or climate change? and We also have as you're all aware, I'm sure gio gio reports on the state of Of DOE's approach at least to dealing with its legacy problems And our environmental liability from that continues to grow even even as we continue to do work So we should find better ways to use our scarce resources Or or perhaps otherwise Put our resources to better use if we can find better solutions here And some of this means moving beyond simple compliance assessments and compliance has a role Don't don't get us wrong here. It really does But there's different ways of making better decisions And and hence using resources more effectively and later in the presentation. I'll touch a little bit on some programs at IAA trying to head in this direction, but also In very briefly what the UK has been doing and we'll see if we can get them to give a presentation to you in the future Other thoughts on this are 40 years of practice and changes in technology to let alone society Since regulations were first written on typewriters And maybe with that 40 years of of experience, we could actually rethink how we should be doing this so that we're much more effective at it And I was at a waste management conference years ago at the time where the Nuclear Regulatory Commission held Friday sessions after waste management And I asked some questions in what when they put up a list of what they call priorities, which I think really were urgences But um, one of the questions I asked when they talked about 100 years of disposal in our future still and my question was Well, do we still want to be asking these same questions 100 years from now? Or do we want to actually deal with it? I mean, we have different problems here that are caused by various levels of conservatism with In our system on top of a regulatory structure that is complex to say the least So next up next slide For the next one darling Can you hear me still Paul, do you want to complex modeling one or This one right there. Okay Yeah, so, um We we tend to approach A radioactive contamination, especially radioactive waste disposal with performance assessments that are really long-term complex modeling and Maybe we should be asking why We we model into the distant future That's fraught with vast uncertainties that increase with time and yet our models don't accommodate increased uncertainty with time Partly because that's difficult to do and partly because we wouldn't know where to take it. I don't think Future changes in technology society and even evolution are not accounted for I mean, we we built a model for Clive in Utah that um Because it was depleted uranium and part of the regulation talked about peak dose Um, without really connecting what that means Um, we we ended up modeling two million years into the future and at that point I'd say evolution has a role to play as well The pure economics of the problem discounting is allowed under a Lara and should be But that should then limit how far we're modeling into the future and all of this seems disconnected from performance objectives, which are more or less stated for present day conditions, but We we're also looking at long compliance periods where Even the the nrc had a diagram at one point that had um I see a time on the x-axis and uncertainty on the y-axis and it was a cartoonish diagram But it acknowledged that uncertainty in societal change Happens so fast that you know, it's and we've all seen that in our lifetimes. I mean I couldn't call home in the 1980s when my parents moved because I had no phone to call from and my kids will ask me Why didn't you use your cell phone and technology has changed so fast and will continue to do so But we don't account for that when we're modeling out thousands if not millions of years into the future And obviously with environmental uncertainty natural catastrophes are are likely to happen and We're seeing them more and more now partly because of climate change, but they're going to happen anyway Uh next slide so we could If I wanted to really oversimplify PA models science models to radioactive waste disposal I I think we've got enough experience with this at this point that we could say Almost if there's water or erosion and people then there's a potential problem And if there's no water and no erosion or no people then there's not much of a problem And that that's an oversimplification But where I really want to go with this is We build massive complex models first and what we should be doing probably is addressing the decision problem first And using the decision problem to understand what level of modeling do we actually need to solve the decision problem? um I I had a note down there partly because of Work we've been doing with the IAA but Just acknowledged that the us and the western world have resources beyond what the rest of the world have And so in some ways the the cost model should be different around the world I mean we we were looking at a site in ukraine before the recent war but That site was left over from the soviet empire and had uranium all over the place But there were 150 businesses operating on the site and they said you can't clean this up We'd rather live with the contamination. They're very different Value systems than we have perhaps and and certainly different cost structures That if we were dealing with this around the world, we'd have to be thinking about it more broadly But in the us and the western world We we have resources to address most of our contamination problems perhaps if we can Align them better with Being more effective and efficient next one so what what we've been doing for Quite some time and we started this program with EPA in the late 1990s But it's really decision science or structured decision making and structured decision making is a term of art that was brought about by a book by robin greggory and his Colleagues at the university of british columbia at the time that was in 2012 but Really what they were following on from was Ralph keen his work in the 1990s on value focused thinking And this is Close to a quote from Ralph Keeney. I'm not sure I got it exactly right But basically what he said was the only reason we're making a decision is that we care about something Maybe we should focus on what we care about first So basically address the value system before we work out what models we need to to address the decision problem This also leads to upfront stakeholder engagement because it's the stakeholders who who have the value system that matters for a specific problem And In a way, what this also does is move us from the dad paradigm to the ed paradigm These are ed is a term that are now borrowing from the environment agency in the uk But they they change their paradigm from decide and now let's defend to engage deliberate decide And to just to Maybe put that in pictures because my wife always says that I never put enough pictures in my slides. So next one here is a statue from a A dutch artist if you move to the next slide, or maybe you have But the purpose of it is that planning must be deliberate deliberative and collaborative Then action can be taken quickly and carefully. I don't often hear that in Our industry, but I have heard it a few times. I heard it from duck hensie when he was in los alamos for example and to I forget the names now, but um a national cleanup workshop. I've heard this occasionally, but it's not very often And then there's also einstein who's quoted as saying at one point If I had an if I had an hour to solve the problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about it and five minutes thinking about solutions That that's sort of the path that we're going down with building out the decision structure is understand the problem And then you can find the right solutions to it And in in our industry, we tend to jump straight into scientific modeling instead of understanding the problem so next one and there's another There's another critical issue here as well that addresses conservatism and I borrowed this quote from A person named morgan jones. It was actually a cia analyst But he wrote a book called the thinkers toolkit And this quote seemed to hit the mark to me But the point is we should be separating values from science and when when we build conservative PA or risk assessment models What we're actually doing is embedding our value system in the science and that that creates something that is Really usually hard to understand. We might think it's easier because we've created conservatism, but Conservatism is never what we really think it is In one direction there may be conservatism, but if you're going to buy conservatism in one direction, you've lost it in another direction It's never what we think it is So That's one of the things that happens within decision analysis or analysis or is required by the theory Is we separate the value system from the science so we separate utility and probability That in a way makes the solutions more honest and when we Do a sensitivity analysis on these types of models We might find That it's something on the probabilistic side that the The the conclusion or the response is sensitive to but it might be on the value side instead At least now we'll know And I I think about these things sometimes along the lines of yucca mountain and whip Where you know yucca mountain failed not because of anything scientifically but because of You know in politics really and whip is the same whip didn't succeed because of science so much as it did because It was driven by a value system jobs were wanted and not that the science was irrelevant But it wasn't necessarily the driver for the decisions that have been made Next one So where we go structured decision making said earlier Gregory's book and and Keeney so we can probably move on to the next one, but The last quote there from Keeney values are what we fundamentally care about in decision making alternatives or options are simply means to obtain our values so especially in a situation where we're faced with Competing stakeholders and competing objectives and this sort of approach where you focus on the value system first Works really well It helps bring stakeholders together when they all of a sudden realize that at a fundamental level They share the same or at least similar value systems It helps get conversation going as well Next one Here's a diagram of how this works Um Actually the the usgs has a program that that follows this same process. They have a slightly different Ground it's the same process. You can find that by searching google or something like that Or these days use chat gpt or something um But we we start with understanding the context which is basically Making sure everybody in the room or stake got a stake in this problem Understands the background of the problem where we are and what we're trying to achieve So we understand the context of the problem and that all needs to be shared So that everybody's got a common playing field Then what we do is do an elicitation session with the stakeholders To address their value system, which you know, it's it's theirs. Our job is facilitation or elicitation All we're doing is trying to help them solve their own problem them being the stakeholders And the decision makers so We're trying to define objectives through Their value system through what matters to them and then I Step three is now that's identifies some options or alternatives That might actually achieve those objectives We we jump from Stakeholders at that point also to subject matter experts because we need to make sure that options are actually Literally achievable There's no point having options in an evaluation that are not achievable So some subject matter expertise is needed at that point And then once that decision model is structured in this way We can see what models or science models cost models, whatever they are are actually needed to solve the problem And certainly subject matter expertise is needed in step four to both specify and evaluate options And from that we could say take action, but I'll be a little careful and say that Models are good at providing insights Taking action purely based on a model might not be a great thing to do but Certainly this system will throw out the optimal options or prioritize options or whatever is needed Basically in a decision decision analysis context So next one so this along the way, we're doing If the community is one of the stakeholders, this is addressing community involvement And we're describing the problem to them and then trying to understand what matters to the community Let alone other stakeholders or interested parties And most of the problems we're dealing with have a community stakeholder group that's going to be involved And then we'll identify alternatives with them as I said a minute ago when And then we turn to the subject matter experts to complete the alternatives and the decision makers to select the best alternative So next one is about the benefits of doing this It helps that the problem is fully described The stakeholder engagement happens up front. It happens throughout the whole process Although I I always think that any process that is new to somebody It it always takes a few times to To become familiar with it, but this really is easier to understand at the end of the day It's easier to communicate and explain the stakeholders are brought along every step of the way. It's their value system So they they see what's going on their values are represented directly and the whole system Represents what we could be in quotes there, but it's really the stakeholders and the subject matter experts It's all based on what we think we know and what our uncertainties are that that is it's basically trying to be honest Um, you know, we we were asked once this is another Clive example, but we were asked to model Clive as if all the um Surrounding area was sand and we said why would we do that? And the answer what we got was so you can push more water through the system and we said, why would we do that? How are we expected to explain? Conservatism in that sort of sense to anybody You know, how does it make sense to to build models that are conservative in In strange ways like that and don't there and actually represent the system that we're trying to model But the whole process here of going through the value system trying to work out what models we need to now solve the decision problem And bringing all the stakeholders and decision makers along every step of the way It makes it very difficult to disagree with the solutions. It helps avoid redo It helps avoid having to provide another rock It's also technically defensible reproducible, you know, lots of other sort of mum and apple pie words here that apply So that's the system in a nutshell in the next slide. I'll talk a little about an IAEA project where We have a report that is going through the system. We can switch to the next slide and the report that's going through the system is a Out essentially this is that we should change our parents so that we can make more efficient and effective decisions And I don't expect anybody to read this The previous one was the old way. Sorry go back a couple Yeah, so Old way back one more Slide 14 So slide 14 We put these figures into the report that this was our interpretation of the way work is done now Where the focus is really on modeling Or science modeling and the decision issues come after that fact And the new way on the next slide Changes that script. So these figures are in our report Which is part of the Modaria group for IAEA and that report will probably come out in the next year or two Takes IAEA a long time to finally publish these reports But the next two slides I tried to simplify this into what we're really talking about If you get these slides, you're welcome to look at these in more detail and reach out if you have questions But the next slide in trying to simplify this So slide 16 The old way is doing science first risk and dose assessment second Statistics and decision analysis third and stakeholder engagement fourth So that's a simplification admittedly, but this is Typically how our work how we undertake our work And slide 17 then just flips that on its head So really if we if we want to try and find a better way of doing this We should be doing it completely the other way around so slide 17 My internet must be slow So that that's what we did in one of our IAEA reports. Um, and then I said I Touch on what the UK is doing as well. This might be something that you want to look into some more on slide 18 But the UK has changed its regulatory guidance and Despite my accent where work is concerned. I'm from the US. I've been here for He's 35 years now And I I'm I'm not nearly as aware of what's going on in the UK as you might be in some ways But um, you UK's regulatory guidance changed. I found this out by working with some of the my British friends in IAEA territory and they This rewrite of their guidance is really very much along the lines of stakeholder engagement structured decision making They might call it something else, but it's basically the same thing And listening to some of them talk about the successes that are coming from this I think would make it It Worth while for the US to at least see and understand what the UK has been doing So they they've changed it from the way we currently do our work in the US To a new paradigm and it seems to be successful for them as we think it would be And then next slide It's just trying to tie this back to Alara and picking on One definition of Alara that I picked up off the website. I think this is an NRC Definition somewhere But we all know what Alara means But we're we're trying to take into account the state of technology the economics of improvements related to technology And to public health and safety and other societal The socio economic considerations. I mean Basically Alara's I mean, it's a description of decision analysis And when I first came into this industry, I sort of wondered why aren't we doing decision analysis when Alara is crying out for it And that that's essentially what we're proposing here with structured decision making I think the same applies to some other regulations in the US as well that If you read the preambles to them, they're they're basically saying It's about decision science. Let's do this in a in a smart way But somehow we haven't gone there very often So that that was the bulk of my presentation I've written down on a few other slides some example projects that we've worked on and Put a uranium mill tailings example on the back end where we actually implemented this This is at a slight a site in Slovenia I'm working with The IAA and Slovenian friends over there But I'm happy Show the list of examples and walk you through the uranium mill tailings example or stop and address questions Thank you, Dr. Black for a very clear and refreshing presentation We now have some time for questions from board members and academy staff So for those of you in your room in the room, please raise your hand or your card And for those of you online raise your virtual hand Looks like Allison has done so first Hi there Thanks so much for the presentation I completely agree with you about performance assessments and Your understanding of the problem that the the real problem is Siting and the social aspects of it and not the technical aspects of it and I've been saying that for probably Decades now So basically what you're proposing is as far as I understand it and as far as I understand that The the problem in your view is the United States and their approach to high-level nuclear waste disposal Because what you're proposing is a safety case And that's been used successfully in Finland and Sweden and and in many countries for their Siting of nuclear waste disposal and successfully because they Selected sites and Finland is you know in the process of constructing the repository and Sweden is close to begin constructing etc and in fact The use of a safety case was proposed by the blue ribbon commission in 2012 On which I sat and then the reset The reset group in our report that came out in 2018. So we've been the number of us have been saying this over and over again And and I think you're right in identifying that the problem in the u.s. Is that really it's the sturds That have forced This use this sort of sole reliance on modeling complex modeling as you point out And then the and then the use of a basically a single number to decide whether the site is reasonable or not instead of As you one of your slides talked about all the you know, you should be honest about all the issues that are associated with the particular site etc And I completely agree with you there. So I just want to understand. Are you talking about the u.s. specifically or Other countries because I don't I mean a lot of countries that are further along Now than the u.s. In terms of citing a repository have already adopted this method Right, and you know more about that than me, but as my understanding is in terms of citing you're correct in terms of other radioactive contamination issues and the work we've been doing at iaa is with Is a lot of it's been with hoarse monk and finandez if you know hoarse but He's been trying to push in this direction, which is why we got together around eight years ago now and he asked us to come over and help him with Moving iaa in this sort of direction as well So for for citing I know the uk and canada have moved in this direction And the the u.s. Is trying to perhaps But for things like remediation decommissioning Let alone disposal I think the iaa and other countries Would still benefit from this approach. I don't think that That's well established yet and iaa is trying to establish that much more broadly than just for citing And and do you use the term safety case because that's in the literature? That's the term of art That's the term of art outside the u.s. Yes, right? I know the u.s. Yeah, I agree with you the u.s. Should be adopting a safety case Unfortunately for the u.s The real sticking point is congress and congress has to change the law For there to be progress on the on the high level nuclear waste piece of things that that was that The nrc meeting that I said that I attended and asked a question That that was really What my question is all about it's gonna it would take decades for us to change the system over here But if we don't change it, we're going to be stuck with it for a lot longer So Somewhere it would be helpful if we could find the political will to change it at least that's my my view Yeah, I I agree. Unfortunately. I've looked at this in detail and there's not a lot of incentives to to make change But anyway, thank you Yeah Yeah, paul Thank you so much. That was very enlightening as will said refreshing And so I kind of have a similar question to allison, but i'm going to broaden it a bit So I maybe it's in two parts. So I understand from when I heard a version of this presentation A couple months ago the waste management symposium You had mentioned that you had gotten some support neptune support from uh department of energies office environmental management So I think that's encouraging that, you know, do we em at least some officials are receptive to this approach and Sounds like they're you're willing to take it on board and and to Apply it So maybe you could if you could speak to that a bit and then kind of the another question was You know for this board nuclear radiation studies board, obviously, you know, our interest is on nuclear issues and nuclear waste management and you spoke really directly to that however Thinking about the structured decision making approach Obviously it could apply to almost anything involving, you know humans doesn't have to be water and erosion but anything dealing with human beings and decision making especially group a decision making whether it's on climate or energy choices or Anything that really matters the human beings and that they value so Maybe if you could touch on kind of the broader applications of structured decision making to areas outside of nuclear waste disposal. Thanks I can touch on what we've done and I know Other decision analysts have worked on various other projects and You know, we call this structured decision making in part because it's a term of art um But really when robin greggory and his colleague wrote their book They they really only um pursued as far as the value system Left it there Whereas ralph keeney originally essentially a Bayesian decision analysis and that that's what we're doing here ultimately mathematically this is easy in decision theory um in terms of Where Be applied I mentioned my colleague. Um, dr. Tom Stockton at the beginning of this And internally we were all chatting about this once and Tom said In an answer to what could we apply this to he said Well, we can apply this to any decision problem and every problem is a decision problem So, you know, it has broad applicability I I I Beyond that Uh sets and capacity Um, you know, this analysis has been around since the 19th is if not early Um, it it works in some situations, but there are other arenas that haven't picked up on the value of it and It may may be in in our industry here We we're in parts. Um, I I think about this in terms of recurrence circular as well, but a little bit differently but We had scientists drive And Maybe would have benefited if if different drivers early on To draw in terms of all our interrupts, but yeah I'm sorry to interrupt, but you you were breaking up if maybe if you can turn off your uh camera that would help with your bandwidth Showing your internet is uh kind of low. Thanks. Thanks. Okay. Yeah, sorry about that. Um, I'm actually out of town and so Internet's not as good as I'm used to I guess um, but um Going back to other examples that we've worked on and I put a list of them on that slide Which one was it slide 20 maybe? Um Looking for EPA and it's a short list of ones for EPA. They're they're always fun and interesting But one of them was about brownfields revitalization. Um We actually did a project that the city of cleveland called reimagining cleveland where their concern was that They'd lost half their population in the last 50 years and they need to get it back What do they need to do? We've done Resiliency planning for climate change at three different locations Stormwater quality issues. We did coral reef management in puerto rico We we solved the problem for dairy farms in louisiana And then outside of EPA We've we used this approach for chemical warfare agent cleanup in umid tiller Some uso problems For fda. We built them a system for prioritizing Mitigating foodborne illnesses. We're currently working on one associated with geothermal energy development and It's just a wide range of Different problems. It goes back to what tom said every problem is a decision problem. So I think I think if for simple problems this approach isn't needed But where there's complexity especially complexity with stakeholders and competing objectives One thing I used to say was um I humans are not very good at solving problems that have more than three or four moving parts And in in the problems we're dealing with in in this world radiation We we tend to have many more than three or four moving parts Within the um DOE community I I I see that a couple of people that we're working with are on the call Paul bambia and brad frank unless I missed a few others But we're working at west valley. I would say that we're we're not following a strict Structured decision-making paradigm of starting from there, but I don't think that's The the the fault of of the pro of of the west valley program I think it's more endemic than that in the us as allison was pointing to But we are nevertheless building a decision analysis End to that for optimization Um to decide how to decommission phase two at west valley in los alamos Looks like we started this program in los alamos when duck hincey was there Then he retired and covet came along at the same time So it's been on hold for several years and one of the reasons i'm in los alamos this week is to try to resurrect it So we might get that going Up at handfoot. We actually implemented this for a very small part of their environmental surveillance program Which You mean the the objective there is to I'll say optimize the environmental surveillance program but you really think the other way of putting that is In this particular case is having seen 20 years of data that They're shown no releases. Why do we still have an environmental surveillance program that's? Looking for releases in the way that it is it needs to be Optimized which I think means minimize the current approach and Introduce something new and different But with that that we will undertake that with stakeholder engagement using this type of approach Thank you I guess I'll take the prerogative of the chair and Ask a question This may be a heretic heretical question, but um It's long struck me that we might be too ambitious in our expectations We know for example that dry cask storage Is relatively cheap and effective safe The drawback is it may only last 100 years before you need to take action again but we've and given the half life of the Nuclear waste that we're dealing with that that won't be sufficient But we've dealt with other long-life problems in other realms of public policy And if for example, I said that I had a plan to solve poverty for But it would only last 100 years It's not like people would say well get out of my office So I guess my question to you is that are we are we looking at this problem in in the wrong way? And should we fundamentally rethink that heretical? I think so at least to some extent. I mean going down this path I think that the Very long time frames that we look at at least need to be thought about differently um in a in a purely economic decision analysis sense Where we include any form of discount factor I mean even social discount factors run According to the literature around one to three percent If if we're doing any form of discounting Then modeling out beyond a thousand years is not useful for decision purposes It might be useful in a sense for insights, but there's so much uncertainty in the future even that's hard to to justify in some ways So and yeah, we we tend to think that and we did we wrote a short paper in rat waste solutions along these lines that changing our Regulatory approach that's based on compliance periods to one that is more more based on Rolling windows and learning as we go, but you know making decisions Earn some more see if the decision stays or needs to be changed But do it in a in the context of rolling windows a little bit more along the lines of Either record or server would be beneficial Thank you. Are there any further questions from board members or academy staff? Just just a comment Well, and that's the one problem with your plan to do these rolling decisions Uh And you know or use interim storage and then change it out every hundred years is the question of who's going to pay for that Sure So that's why we really need to have a more robust permanent solution Because we don't know the future and we don't know whether institutions are going to exist to protect us in the future And I think we're already getting intimations that They won't be around in the future because They've proved to be they're proving to be unreliable so yeah It might depend on the situation, but even if you've got permanent disposal you're going to be monitoring it And I think it's still along those lines that we look at Generational monitoring we we did a subject matter elicitation in the 1990s that Yeah, at um, Nevada test site for the low level waste sites and That that was where the subject matter experts came out was we should be revisiting these problems generationally Whereas our regulations are not set up that way They're set up instead to address compliance periods and I'm not sure we're actually You know at the end here saying different things we might be thinking about it slightly differently, but permanent disposal is fine It's still going to be monitored and the question is what does that look like? Thank you Um, I think with that, um, we can turn to our next presentation Um from dr. Andrea de carlo who is the director of Radiation and nuclear countermeasures program at the division of allergy immunology and transplantation At the national institute of allergy and of an infectious diseases in the national institutes of health Dr. Decarlo Yeah, that's a lot of acronyms. Congratulations So this for me is the ultimate experience because I'm truly hybrid I am in the room and I'm speaking to people and I'm also on the zoom So this is just a wonderful experience and um, thank you so much to everybody Who was on the nuclear radiation studies board who recommended me to be a speaker today I'm delighted with the opportunity and it was a beautiful drive downtown I got to see the tidal basin and what's left of the cherry blossoms. So that's an unusual experience Experience for me at this point. But um, as mentioned, I am the director of the radiation and nuclear countermeasures program We are a part of n i a i d which you can see on the screen. I'm not going to go through it again And so many people know our former boss dr. Fauci so Privileged to be able to work with him over the years and uh, of course wishing him all the best So when I also see on the line, I did a little self promotion. I sent the email link out So I do see a lot of people from our program awardees from the program And so maybe you'll see some mention of your data and I hope I do it justice But um, in any case, I want to also mention that I joined the n i a d in 2004 I was previously a research professor at catholic university around the corner from here And uh, I only became the director in 2019 right before coven So it's been a wild ride and hopefully I can take you a little bit on that ride and Just discuss a little bit out of our program So, uh, we were established way back in 2004. So this was pretty much in the aftermath of 9 11 The cold war has largely ended people weren't thinking about radiation all the time and then all of a sudden Oh my gosh, we need to really be paying attention to these cbr and threats so In 2004 congress said we're going to give money to the nih And we spend that money as part of that national institute of allergy infectious diseases And we are a funding agency. So we are tasked with taking that that important Funding from congress and putting it into different mechanisms that we have so we fund grants Which are ro ones and p o ones um cooperative agreements. We do contracts. We actually have some specialized contracts I see dr. Polly chang is on the call She has the p. I have one of our product development contracts at sri And we also do interagency agreements where we provide funds to really leverage Government subject matter expertise in other areas. Uh, so but above all we do funding We're not bench scientists anymore Although we all used to be and our research priorities are really threefold one is we need to develop drugs And get them into the stockpile so that our nation can be better prepared If the unthinkable happens with regards to a radiological or nuclear incident So every day I hope that the work that we do is never going to be needed But we're talking about large large doses of radiation within our program Um, I've heard some discussions of low dose. We're definitively high dose So we're looking at zero gray up until uh, unsurvivable doses and probably the 1012 gray range And the products that we develop have to be useful at 24 hours or later Because our mandate is for civilian populations. We won't know in advance So do d nasa other agencies covered that protective element where you can give something ahead of time But it's probably going to take 24 hours or longer for us to get anything out there So that's that's sort of our line in the sand. Um, the next part is is also products But products to remove rate of nucleic contamination and I'll talk about all these in more detail on later slides And the third one is what we call biodecimetry. So this is taking biomarkers of exposure biological Endpoints that you see and people have been exposed and trying to translate them into a device That can tell if someone's been exposed or not and also Taking those biomarkers and being able to track them and telling you know physicians Okay, this person is probably going to need an early treatment So it's to triage a lot of people in a short amount of time and to guide medical management The possible scenarios that we think about are again unthinkable. We don't want to We don't want to believe that there's the possibility of these things happening But we are tasked with detonation of a nuclear device power plant accidents or attacks Hidden radiation emitting devices and also radiation dispersal devices or dirty bombs And just being concerned with a generalized radian nuclei that could be released in a number of different ways So when the body experiences radiation, the first thing in some some particulate radiation concerns You need to get sometimes particles that have been inside the body You need to get them out the classic example, which I mentioned to a teenager They had no idea what it's talking about was a Alexander Litvinenko who was Poisoned he ingested polonium perhaps if they had identified it sooner or if we had a greater tools available I suspect he would have lived longer. I'm not sure he would have survived given the dose he received But we're developing compounds to address those concerns and then we call medical countermeasures or mcm to treat both the acute Symptoms of radiation exposure and those delayed effects that can happen. So acute tends to be gastrointestinal and bone marrow Those are generally very sensitive organs and then you have a lot of things that can come up later We're also concerned with combined injuries. So that tends to usually be a cutaneous burn or a wound in combination with radiation Which really is a bad thing in terms of survival, but that can also incorporate hemorrhage with radiation fracture with radiation Sepsis with radiation. So there's a whole range of combined injuries that we've been involved in and then of course biotysymmetry This being a graphic from AFRI that we work with closely So across the I guess now 18 plus years of our program We've had the opportunity to test a number of different medical countermeasures You'll see that most of them are in the hematopoietic range because this is the most sensitive organ And so there was a lot in the clinical space already to address hematopoietic injuries And so that's sort of where we went initially. But you can see now that we've I'll discuss in a moment. We've had some successes in treating bone marrow injuries We've been focusing in on other areas in terms of medical countermeasures And of course, we've always had radionuclide and biotysymmetry I'll be talking in more details about those programs and radionuclide is is actually starting to become more prominent In terms of decorporation and blocking So we view our program as a continuum We fund both basic research your base your bread and butter R01 type activities mechanistic hypothesis driven How can we identify targets that radiation injury manifests in a cellular tissue? And we need to develop animal models of those exposures so that we can do preclinical testing And then we have a sort of our mid-stage development This tends to be Contracts where a lead candidate has been identified and we want to do things like Can we make it in a formulation that'll work better? IB perhaps is not the best formulation for mass casualty, for example We're going to try to understand some of the safety that might be available for it And then we have advanced development and this is a an activity that that we are Involved in from beginning to end, but the advanced development does tend to be carried out With some of our other partners in a more focused way. We're always thinking about regulatory affairs How can we move these products forward to the food and drug administration? And we need to get them licensed for their acute radiation or delay syndrome So that they can be stockpiled and again, we have a number of partners in this effort We work with academic institutions Through companies and contractors and then our partners at Barta and FDA to get some of these advances through the through to the finish line So I've mentioned the FDA a couple times. They have a unique licensure pathway that's used for kembi or rad nuke threats And in order to do that, uh, it's basically when you cannot do clinical trials We cannot except for certain cancer patients that provide supportive information through a radiation We can't just say hey, we'll just give you a little radiation So those challenge trials are not permitted. So as a consequence, we have to carry out pre-clinical Investigations and there's four points that the FDA requires us to do in appropriate animal models to help ascertain what the mechanism of action both of the radiation and the drug is We have to do pivotal studies which are done typically in at least one animal model That's predictive of the human response. You have to have a primary endpoint, which is usually least survivability Increased survival, but there are other end points that are certainly considered And all of those things that you do pre-clinically have to direct you to be able to select an appropriate dose of the drug in humans Um, so there's a lot of pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic activities that happen Along the way sometimes the FDA is probably going to require if we ever have to use these drugs in this situation that we'd have some kind of post-marketing And I would point out that the biosymmetry devices actually do not use the animal rule per se So I give the 21 CFR code there if you want to go and read the regulations. I've been reading them for decades so A little start a little bit with some of the advances that we've had in these individual organ systems as mentioned on that first slide So, uh, we are we were initially very concerned with the bone marrow injuries potentially myeloblative doses of radiation that people might experience So, you know going back quite a while in 2010 and even earlier you're going to see we have a lot of meetings And we write a lot of meeting reports because we don't like our information to remain siloed But we became early early adapters of what was going on in the oncology space and trying to see if we could Repurpose for example. Newpagen has been repurposed. Nulasta has also been repurposed for acute radiation syndrome lukine sargramostin, which is GM CSF that hit both the granulocyte and the macrophage lineages and then end plate So represented here are the what I would call four success recent successes In terms of developing drugs for stockpiling Our group has been involved directly involved in three of them Lukine came solely through BARDA for its licensure and and you know, these are different stages of stockpiling either they were there They're being moved in and out. You'll you'll see that our advanced development groups often put out procurement requests to to purchase these particular drugs We've also been very interested in cellular therapies because they're we had to provide a protected space because people are like Well, why would you use a cellular therapy if you can use a growth factor? And it's just that cellular therapies are sometimes if you truly have a very myeloblative Experience for a patient you may need to use cellular therapies. So we had again a workshop on this particular topic I'm just showing here the general lineages that everybody needs to be concerned about And and we've looked at for example a placentally derived stem cells as a therapy A number of progenitor cells. So we've looked at multi stem, which is Targets a couple of these common progenitors myeloid cells mega karyosite lineages And also platelets. So these are all all of these Different blood components work together to help ensure survival. So we we try to have programs in each area So we're not missing anything The gi tract is the next to actually it would be the first to succumb, but it is not the most sensitive People who are exposed to very high doses could succumb from GI injury in in days to weeks There's a number of different medical countermeasure approaches general categories that we've looked at. Some of those are shown here Things like the cellular therapies that I mentioned things that block cytokines We have a more recent endeavor into microbiome focused science. So we just funded a consortia a consortium of cooperative agreements where they work together And they're focusing in on the potential of harnessing the microbiome not only as a potential biomarker of injury but as a treatment modality And we also have things focused on the vascular I think many people in the research radiation research field understand that radiation is truly a vascular problem It it does have all of these other Implications but but the vascular is is common to all of these different organ systems And it's like the impact on the blood vessels are likely responsible for the kind of multi organ injury that you see And not just as a vessel moving Things around the body, but also as a responding organ within the body And so we have things that have been focused on these vascular And then I like to call these the anties So the anti apatotics all the ones you see listed here are of course the first thing that we looked to knowing That oxidative stress apatosis Inflammation result from these kinds of radiation exposures Because the gi before the because the heme has been doing really well We've actually shifted some of our program emphasis more to skin So we anticipate that there are going to be skin injuries We do our efficacy testing that we support is primarily in these different small Small mid-sized animals mouse and rat models of radiation induced skin injury Guinea pigs you see here. This is I think this is A mini pig up in the top right here and also some human ex vivo models of skin So we actually support research in a lot of these different animal models with the end goal of course is selecting an animal that really Mimics what you'd expect in humans and generally speaking pigs are used in dermatology extensively. They're they're believed to be Central to understanding human skin responses. So we feel like we're on the right track there We've also done a number of kinds of radiation exposures There's a concern for example that there might be fallout Which maybe we need to worry about beta exposures or gamma exposures And we've used a lot of different Devices to achieve those kinds of injuries and we've also done again these combined injuries And the end points have varied. We've been working with several groups and also with the FDA We held a meeting on cutaneous radiation injury at the request of the FDA To understand what are the best end points to look at because with skin? It's not so much survival as it is. Are you able to heal that wound quickly? And diminish the the draw that that patient will have on medical resources So if you can get them out earlier and they don't need to be for example under Critical care for a particular wound then that's something you want to do Skin injuries are also known to be have a latency associated with them They may appear to heal and then weeks months sometimes even years later Because the nature of radiation damage to the underlying structures these can reopen So it's it's really insidious and it's not like thermal burn Although we've looked to the thermal burn community to try to identify countermeasures that might work And we're playing around in our program with some novel imaging methods So that we can see something a wound may appear to be healed on the surface But it's teeming with inflammation underneath So we've looked at things like infrared imaging ultrasounds and we're trying to come up with ways that Are quantitative so that we can go to the FDA and say this is the percent change You actually see in this injury with this particular compound This is just a really brief overview of the kinds of things that we've invested in And again, as I mentioned, we did have a meeting These are the medical countermeasures that were discussed during that meeting Just to see what the FDA really wants We have to be essentially in lockstep with the Food and Drug Administration because Our eventual goal is to bring products to them So we work very closely make sure we're using the right models the right endpoints And we try to provide that guidance back even to our very early stage investigators So they're always they may be doing just hey, we think this pathway is involved But they're always thinking about what the potential endpoint could be of the things that we're funding them to study So as I mentioned previously, we do anticipate Radiation combined injuries are going to make up a lot of the injuries that we're going to see if there is especially that nation event and that's We know that at least in the animal models and also from what we have in human data that I'll mention in a moment That it does definitely Make your prognosis much worse if you've got one injury on top of another in terms of survivability I'm showing here an LD 50 curve. Can you guys see mine? Yeah, you can see okay So this LD 50 tells you basically what dose of radiation is survivable in the different models these are These are murine because we don't really do combined injury in monkeys, which is our our gold standard animal model But you can see here that the LD 50 for radiation alone could be in particular mouse models as high as 9 to 10 gray However, when you combine it with burn or wound the survivability goes down So the curve shifts to the left And this has also been seen in retrospective analysis of Hiroshima and Nagasaki I know Amy our dove epidemiologist in the room is familiar with some of these data And also this particular table was given to me by dr. Ola Shapiro who was previously at the FDA And she was the first responder at Chernobyl and so what they found is that Of the victims that did develop an acute radiation syndrome a diagnosed ars Almost nearly half of them had concomitant radiation burns along with that Radiation total body exposure. So this is clearly something we need to think about and we've done a lot of investment in early animal models But we tend to tell people get to the FDA for radiation first and then the combined injuries will come Later in other kinds of studies The delayed effects of acute radiation exposure again deer. These are the late impacts from an acute exposure We have a number of animal models that we've used. You can see those here both small and large models we also We are very Cognizant of the fact that these are very precious animals. We are required by FDA to do work in non-human primates And previously that was done in rhesus monkeys, but with the advent of covet and the fact that china is no longer exporting the animals The whole research community is kind of shifting around into other species that might be available We can do partial body Irradiations because if your animal is going to Develop some of these light effects it has to survive the early ones And since the late effects require higher doses to actually manifest an injury We often will shield part of the bone marrow of the animal so that we can Ensure their survival so that they can develop late effects. So that's what we call our pbi or partial body models We also study cardiovascular effects and all the previous work We did with bone marrow and has involved tbi or total body irradiation And we of course in cutaneous we've done for example high dose irradiation focused with or without trauma and we've also through the work that we've developed with contractors and grantees in our program identified that there are actually late gi and Um hematopoietic syndromes. So those are not always thought about when you think about these late lung and kidney complications but That is another area that the science that we fund has been able to develop So in terms of the medical countermeasures approaches that we've looked at for lung again, you have your aunties These general categories. We also look at immune modulators Interesting things like surfactants and mucosillary clearance drugs Are also have been a part of our portfolio in the past with the understanding that maybe you can't maybe you'll have Particulates that you need to get out by coughing them up or removing them through mucosillary clearance So those are all approaches that over the years. We've been able to support Kidney is something that's really coming into the program more recently It's it happens after lung but we do have some models that seem to show kidney injury consistent with what's been seen in humans That's primary looking at ACE inhibitors. So again lysinopril Losart and those kinds of drugs which are already licensed and we're able to repurpose and then of course We have these cardiovascular and these delayed gi and heme syndromes that are shown here We did have a meeting on lung as I mentioned lots of meetings And just to kind of show you the data these data were generated in non-human primates and as a late effective radiation exposure You can get the development of fibrotic lesions in the lungs. So you see here The lungs are outlined in light blue and then the pink areas are in Are in the fibrotic areas and so we want to avoid the development of both the pneumonitis Which is the infiltration response and also the fibrosis. So things like statins were studied early on in the program You can see here when an animal is given 15 gray exposure You get a pretty rapid decrease in survival But still, you know 24 weeks, I guess isn't that rapid but However, when you use a statin you can improve overall survival. So that's a repurposing that we did pretty early on in the program There's also this is the data I mentioned on lysinopril This is in a rat model and you can see you have to give a pretty high dose But it's a shielded model so the animals do survive and you can get a dramatic improvement with something that Lysinopril has probably been in millions of people over the years. So this is a approach we're very interested in Biodysymmetry so again, we want to be able to identify biomarkers of injury that can be used to guide medical management and Hopefully quickly sort people into you can go home. You need to stick around We need to do some more studies to make sure we understand what your exposure look like Ideally, we'd have a device that would be able to read it quickly I think we all learned from covet how these devices can be made It would be wonderful if there were some kind of very quick self assessment that could happen I don't think we're quite there yet But the idea that you could do a very quick sampling Ideally, they wouldn't cost a lot of money. They'd be fast and they wouldn't use something that's invasive I think as invasive as we've been looking at has been a finger stick So we use these biomarkers also in addition to determining who needs treatment You can also use them as pharmacodynamic Markers so you can see if a medical countermeasure is working or you can use it for example to bridge a medical countermeasure for example Radiation might bump up a particular cytokine and you drop it back down with your product and you show it in humans And you show it in animals. So it's a nice Bridge across these different species or of course humans being one of them We do fund a lot of work and I you know I see over there sally is a part of that effort that we do cytogenetics and generalized omics So of course this shown here is the the gold standard. These are Dicentric chromosomal assays cytogenetics are of course dna damage induced by radiation exposure. I don't know these may be your data Maybe not we have a lot of them the these heat maps that show Different genes getting turned on and turned off by radio different radiation exposure levels And of course had a meeting on that as well. So we're always We're always testing the water seeing what research is going on and trying to go back to What the FDA wants so that we make sure we keep everybody aligned Our current portfolio we have early through advanced stage development And again, what we try to do is give access to samples provide funding to our awardees so that they can do the pre-clinical studies put together briefing packages Which with the end goal of eventually going to the FDA and in this case It's called an investigational device extension or ide recall It doesn't go through the animal rule. There are different pathways different personalities But we try our best to ensure that these these disparate areas of our portfolio Are well recommended are well addressed We also like the idea of using biomarkers of injury to predict what might happen later So for example, if you have a particular cytokine that goes up within the first 24 hours And you're able to link that to a late effect. You might be able to tell a physician Listen, this guy's not showing lung injury yet, but he probably is going to need a long approach Pretty soon and the earlier you can get it in the better. So we call that predictive biodecimetry We did we've had focused funding in that particular area throughout the years We've also provided interagency agreement funding to our nci colleagues and food and drug administration colleagues We did this pretty crazy study where we irradiated animals and took all kinds of samples. You name it Shally remembers this it was just it was incredibly complex and 12 laboratories received samples ranging from plasma serum urine care Fecal samples and they were able to look at these to see what the biomarkers were we had both unirradiated And irradiated animals and we feel like that's really been able to move this field forward I'll talk also in the fact that those animals all went to wake forests after so they were able to Be a way for us to continue to monitor them and we're considering another study in the next few years So radionuclide decorporation and blocking we We spoke about how you can get radionuclides where they're not supposed to be internally And the key leaders typically allow you to excrete those more quickly There are licensed products, but the ones for plutonium emery simon uranium are only intravenous And so we've put an effort into develop oral formulations of these compounds Which of course would be better for a concept of operations mass casualty use The one that i'm going to discuss and we're very pleased about is the hopo compounds. They were Early research funding from our program are currently now in a clinical trial where any day we're going to be dosing The first patients. This is going to be a safety study. It's an oral compound We're going to be looking for pharmacokinetic Data in the humans that we're hoping is going to be consistent with what's been seen in in the preclinical models It's in clinical trials.gov and we've consented our first few patients So we're excited to have that be an outcome of our work that we've done we also And maybe this will resonate with people is that We you have to understand the dose of radiation you're giving to a preclinical model. It's a problem in our field So we have done what I think is leading the way to actually make sure that the radiation doses that are used across our portfolio are correct Um, you have to be able to compare studies done at different labs You want to be able to have a medical countermeasure tested in one model and another model and we do encourage a lot of that collaboration So generally if you can get within five percent of the dose you're thinking you're Putting in there. That's what sort of the gold standard is and we found that the best way to do this was to award a single contract And we've done that and now other government agencies are reaching out and saying hey Can we use that contract because we really like it that you're able to you know Make sure that the radiation doses are both precise and accurate So previously we had made investments across for example product development contract We had at University of Maryland We participated and helped organize a meeting in 2011 with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and MCI We have a large Large investment in what we call our centers for medical countermeasures against radiation consortium or the CMCRC They started out with a core to make sure the centers were Inline and then we had some more meetings and said yeah, we really need to probably expand out this capability So we gave the core a little more money to go across different parts of the program And ultimately that resulted in the awarding it of a contract in 2020 which is ongoing. It's at the University of Wisconsin And so far more than 30 radiators in our RNCP funded portfolio have been evaluated. They've included x-ray and gamma ray sources They do tld dose symmetry Are contracted as field mapping so make sure that your field is actually centered on where you're putting your samples this has Been a concern with some groups. We've worked with and they offer Phantoms for all these different animal models. So they send out phantoms our awardees Irradiate them send them back and we do sort of an evaluation. So this is just don't look at the details This is just maybe 30 different attempts with multiple radiators across our program And you can see here that some have come in very high Much higher some lower you have ones that hit the sweet spot Some of them don't hit it right away But the nice thing about the program is that it's not just about identifying the problem It's addressing them. So we're very proud of this effort and working with all of our partners to ensure that we're What we're doing is actually what we think we're doing I know i'm going at a very rapid pace. I want to make sure I get through these We also have this late term non-human primate radiation survivor colony. We're very proud of What you're seeing here is actually a graphical representation a snapshot if you will of the colony Where here we have animals that weren't irradiated up to animals that received over ld 90 doses and survived So these are very these are unicorns if you will It was established in 2007 Currently there are over 215 animals in this colony It's about a three million dollar a year investment on the part of niid the animals At any point in time we've had more than 300 but due to Aging out and and lethality deaths, you know late deaths. We've that number has gone down They're fat and happy eating a north american diet watching curious george and national geographic It's really tremendous. They they they're drawn to the monkeys on screens and tv's and it's just an amazing Resource and these animals receive just top-notch care Again, we have animals that are age matched that are not irradiated. We have males and females The doses and the the way they've been irradiated. We've got a lot of different models there And we have animals that were treated with different drugs So we're really able to go back and query these animals. We do routine assessments that data is available The samples are available to the research community If you have this and you can click that link It'll actually take you right to the the website where you can make those requests And it also lets us do that kind of prognostic and predictive biosymmetry Did we see something early on that led these animals to have a greater propensity for lung injury? For example, so it's a continuous resource We've seen some really surprising things happening in these animals that run anticipated High rates of diabetes for example Some immune blind spots where they cannot process for example vaccine the same way vaccination strategies And they are tested annually. They're tested monthly. They're looked at daily So there's a whole lot of things that we do not only to ensure their health and safety But to make those kinds of data and samples available so others can try to better understand What's happening? I was asked to talk about the engagements with other agencies. We're part of the FEMC So we love working with other groups. We hold scientific conferences All these different groups. We publish meeting reports again agency overviews. We co-fund awards with these different groups And we also serve on working groups across government. So we're very heavily invested in the us one government approach We've had a lot of as I mentioned meetings We also have 50 17 publications just a couple are here We're very proud of one that we put out on coven 19 and how it's similar to radiation injury So we were able to repurpose a lot of our approaches for coven Which has been very gratifying And we've also since inception funded 58 different opportunities for funding throughout our program So I I realized it was a sprint, but I appreciate everyone's attention and I'd be happy to answer any questions This is our team without whom none of this would have been possible They're they're amazing to work with every day and many of them are on the call So thank you everyone and thank you especially in my team and I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have Thank you for presenting your research into an extremely complex problem. It's amazing That was very helpful I actually have a question before we turn to the rest of the the board and staff and it was Sparked by one of the last things that you said in the comparison to dealing with coven Could you say a few more words about that? Right? So pretty early on it became apparent that a lot of the strategies that we use these antioxidants anti-inflammatories vascular focused products As the I would say it was probably like june or july It became very apparent that those are the kinds of things that coven tended to be concentrating on We were seeing a lot of symptoms that were very similar to what we knew to follow from radiation exposures, right? So there was a scheme of stresses. There were There were problems for example with Blood vessel patency The the idea that the cardiovascular was implicated the brain fog and everything so One of the people on our team Dr. Carmen Rios. We worked together to try to Let's really read up on the literature and see what connections we can make so we were able to do that That paper was published in radiation research. We're very proud. It's still the most downloaded most red paper Of recent times and so I think that we also were also We're trying to encourage our research community to expand their thinking in terms of maybe we can repurpose things We've been doing and apply them to the the radiation research base. So we did actually have several Wardies pivot and begin doing coven work. In fact, we still have it a clinical trial from one of these radiation focused medical countermeasures that's now being tested for Late lung fibrosis from coven. So yeah, I think that we we and I think many people believe that Because coven is a vascular disease that just happens to get in through your respiratory tract That there's a lot of things that are overlapping in terms of the way it causes injury and ways you may approach that injury to try to mitigate it so things like lung fibrosis were a Perfect match we thought to the kind of stuff that we funded through our program and also some of the cardiovascular and the cns work Fascinating, thank you Are there questions from either in the room or online? Charles Wow, and it's what such a fascinating talk. It was just mind expanding one of the Newer areas that the board and staff have been talking about This meeting in a closed session earlier and then our previous meeting a few months ago beginning of the year And it's not going to surprise you but you know AI and machine learning You know those technologies, of course almost every sector imaginable is now trying to think about how to apply AI and machine learning Or you know you and your research teams are you Thinking about those tools especially kind of like searching for yeah It's like it teed that one up right for me In fact, we're having a meeting this summer that's open on advanced technologies And and one of the parts of that meeting is going to be on data mining and using sort of these AI techniques and where they can be brought to bear on some of the For example, huge volumes of data that are being generated in all of our omics approaches We've had really fun conversations about how chat gpt could be Taken into our program and what it might be able to provide in a way of a really neat tool So yeah, that's definitely something we're trying to stay cutting edge and understand that other cutting edge areas We're looking at our things like Human on a chip technologies for example We recently co-funded some work with nasa to develop some of these chip technologies We think that's the direction it's going in minimizing animal use and really being able to access human tissues in that way That's very exciting. Um, and we we we have a lot of things that are I don't want to say arpa Ask, but we have a lot of aspects of our program that are, you know, sort of our 21 level Maybe higher risk, but really exciting things happening and we're going to try to highlight those during the meeting that we have this summer But definitely, uh, there's a lot of data that needs to be assessed across Especially the biomarkers part of our program and we are looking for those kinds of Techniques to come to the forefront and help us in that Very fascinating. Thank you Yeah, thanks. Um Zoom is being weird. Um so I know it there's something else weird going on. Um so when we go back to covet and some other topics that come with Come up often with our nuclear studies is communication and so And you like one of your first slides is you need to be in there within 24 hours. Yeah Are you teaming with somebody or do you have plans on how to communicate? A positive message that you're the good guy is enough to guide Yeah, so we're not the leads in that effort, but we are involved and uh, those kinds of Communication type activities tend to be within In residents, I call them within health and human services So the administration for strategic preparedness and response are aspir. We have working groups. We have guidance documents We're always putting together what the requirements might look like. Um, you know, there's there's concerns about For example, limiting first responder exposures that you you know that first responders by large by In large tend to be the kind of people that are just going to run towards danger, right? So how do we ensure their safety while they're going into these potentially contaminated areas? So yeah, messaging is very important. Um, a lot of that has occurred for example at the state and local levels There's this fantastic youtube video to go look up Get inside stay inside stay tuned, right? So that's the that's the messaging if something happens a lot of the things that are going on Go into basements go into the lowest level of your house Make sure that you are In place and not racing out because you know in the short time post exposure You're going to have a lot of injuries and a lot of potential for even further damage if you're not smart about it so You know having personally gone through 9 11 working in dc. What's the first thing I did? I hopped in the car and I drove home, right? So if something happens of radiation I hope I have the good sense to take a step back and say no I need to stay put for now So a lot of that messaging a lot of the concerns that go beyond for example medical so the psychological impacts Those are all being considered at sort of different levels. We're really tasked with let's get the drugs developed Let's bring our awardees. They're they're amazing scientific discoveries forward and try to get things Approved and available if we need them But yeah, those kinds of activities are definitely happening at other levels of government And there's a lot of guidance documents out there as well that I can probably provide if you would be interested Yeah, I have another question for you But before I ask it, I'll remind the participants that The q&a session is for board members and national academy staff So and I admit this is a naive question My area of expertise lies outside the the medical world, but it strikes me that your discovery of Of similarities between radiation exposure and cove it was somewhat of a felicitous one And is is there hope that that could lead to broader breakthroughs beyond either cove it or radiation treatment? Um I'm not sure that we have continued investments in in trying to So, you know, a lot of the cove it investments have sort of tailed off, right? So so we don't have continued investments. I'd like to think that the work we do isn't siloed into only meaning a radiation use And in the same way that I think early on we we stole liberally from the ecology space NCI we were very early Begging them for, you know, what are you guys using? What are you working on? I'd like to think it's more of a two-way street now that some of the stuff we're developing We actually send Companies and groups that are interested over to NCI and say maybe this could work for them too So I think in terms of cove it I'm not sure that the research dollars or the emphasis are there currently But we do have work that we funded Particularly some interesting work that we were funding on early biomarkers This these these groups went out and identified early biomarkers of cove it that predict late Late expectations in terms of response. So since some of that has sort of died down I'm not sure how Continued either the funding or the research will be but it's something that we definitely Are still supporting Great. Thank you, Charles Yeah, Andy. I was thinking about I mean, I throw in the u.s. You're you're coordinating with multiple agencies because there are a lot to have, you know Stake in this complex issue set Can't remember if you talk much Maybe wait, yeah, we still have, you know time in this session but to talk a bit about Work with international partners other countries and how does that coordination happen? Where are there differences? How do you harmonize? You're also trying to think about Areas where potentially, you know, but our board could be helpful in terms of thinking about the globe and how to coordinate those efforts Absolutely. Um, great question. So we do have an international footprint. I would say It's in recent years. I've been trying to expand that we are a part of the radiation emergency medic medical preparedness action network Rempan, which is a group that's sponsored by the world health organization So we have a lot of interactions with other countries through the who I had the distinct honor of serving on a consultancy panel for trying to advise International other countries who may not have stockpiles. We recently put together a guidance document that the world health organization actually put out so so we've worked with that we've also Recently been working more closely with colleagues at the irsn in france Who have a lot of radiation associated responsibilities in the country? They do research. They do response. So we've been working closely with them In fact colleagues in germany said hey what you're doing with france. We want to get in on that too Maybe we can develop something similar with you. So we've we've been trying to expand that out We've worked very well with our canadian neighbors They have a lot of things actually figured out pretty well, especially in the area of Determination of dose and they have a network across canada that we're trying to see if we can Work with them and see how their network set up and see if we can get similar things going in the u.s And I think some of the more obvious things are interactions with the radio radiation effects research foundation in hiroshima So we had funded them to do some very valuable studies Using their human patients their human samples that they have which And they're ongoing Association with people who are survivors from from those events trying to look at what their immune responses look like and work With researchers there So we're always looking to make those kinds of collaborations And if you can help us make those stronger or make new ones I think that's definitely something that we as a team would be interested in because a lot of groups I'm learning are really looking to the us and they're saying we're going to let the us figure this out And then oh you've got drugs licensed. Okay, maybe we will Provide some kind of accessibility to those products or maybe you've been able to develop some markers That's not to say that we're leading the way scientifically I just think in terms of the actual how we would put this stuff into place is where I think that we're having a major role And of course amazing research is going on all over the all over the globe That's propelling the entire field forward Mike, did you have a question? I your hand went up and then down. There were some hands on the zoom that went up and down too Yeah Maybe it's a sidebar question. So you work with and the national cancer institute And some of the drugs I saw I think we're like Oh, I know maybe the amgen drug. Yes was derived for people with chemotherapy. Yes. In fact Three of the four came right out of the oncology space. I just wonder if it's if there's thought about going full circle um and using some of the countermeasures you're thinking about and helping Cancer patients that are receiving Radio therapy, that would be great. Yes. And also chemotherapy which causes similar Milo suppression So yes, and in fact when we come across a company that we think hey, you know, your drug works great ahead of time Maybe not so great afterwards. Maybe you should be talking to nci But nci has a tremendously large program where they're always looking and interfacing with the research community I think it's unlikely we'll find something that they didn't already know about But we do try to do that that cross pollination with the nci space The end plate product that you saw is actually for an idiopathic thrombocytopenia So it's for people who have You know, they can't understand maybe the the reasons why they have platelet loss But that came out of the hematology community The things like ACE inhibitors that we're studying have come out of, you know Cardiovascular all different communities So that's not to say that we don't have very interesting novel approaches That are being developed in early stages and some that are even reaching the point where they're starting to talk to the Regulatory agencies about moving them forward. So we do have We have them across the entire spectrum. We have things that are very early very exciting And then we have things that have a lot more data to support their use Thank you very much for your your presentation and your oh, Charles. Did you have another word? Oh, sure. I know I we talked more time and I think Oh, wait, oh you the mail. I'm sorry your hand go Oh Yeah, I don't remember the stop time. Hopefully I gave us some of what Andy was saying I'm thinking about like uh, and also the study, you know, Mike's working on with Madeleine and ellie and WMD would love to learn more about the work. Absolutely. Yeah, stay tuned. Uh, you know, we'll wish them luck in getting their report through review but um You know That's the next step you write 24 7 so I hear we know the next next month or two That's a critical time. But anyway, I was thinking about things like stockpiling and Uh strategic areas you've mentioned, you know with civilian populations You're not gonna Unlike, you know, if you're in the military you could take it ahead of time potentially if you're gonna go into that merge situation But civilian populations as you said probably greater than 24 hours After the event so but then later would be better. Yeah, right, but I'm thinking about but you don't want to wait probably too long Some of our lung drugs we've shown pre clinically you can give them weeks later and they're still effective I mean your window of of where you can have an impact is really short for gi And he right because the damage is so devastating early on So you have short winners, but things like lung and kidney. Maybe you can come in weeks later But yeah, oh interesting. Okay. Well, yeah, I was kind of one of my questions But now I thought about I thought it maybe even more urgent You know you want to get it really deliver quickly. So then in terms of like stockpiling it parts of the country You might want the um multiple stockpiles Kind of evenly distributed. We're not maybe not so evenly distributed but close to population centers Yeah, so um, technically the location of the stockpiles is tightly held Oh, no, no, I don't want you to fall and and we don't get involved in the stockpiling at all And those kinds of specific details I would recommend that you invite our colleagues um at the administration for strategic Preparedness and response to come and brief you because they can give you a lot more Details about how stockpiling works and but the idea is that every uh stockpile That you have them situated across the country so that within 24 hours you could mobilize and get something You know with 9 11. I think we also found that you don't you can't maybe we're not going to have airplanes Maybe we're going to have to consider so I think that the idea is that you can move them Of course, if we have a large scale incident You may not be able to you may be able to get into the periphery of the city But how do we get them in so there's all kinds of what they call con ops or concept of operations And so those feed into the requirements that we have to give to our researchers So, you know it'd be lovely if if your drug was amazing But you had to give it 15 minutes after a radiation that might work if some people happen to Have a problem when they're at a hospital But you know in these other settings It's really more difficult and not only do you have to give the drug at that time frame You have to be able to assess the injury first, right? So some of the things we're looking for we're hoping will take minutes to hours our gold standard takes days So if you lose time even just getting the to the victim of the incident And then you have to wait to know who you know, if it's not obvious I mean, I think some things are going to be obvious But whether you've received a radiation exposure at this point in time is going to look like how long did it take for you to vomit Right, so that's a known prodromal symptom of radiation exposure and so Honestly, if my neighbor is vomiting, I'm probably vomiting, right? So those are really um difficult measures in these kinds of anticipated emergency situations to rely on Things like lymphocyte depletion. So your lymphocyte counts are known to be a particular baseline And if you see them going down serially, you know, someone's got a bit gotten a big exposure But these things take time. So If you can Come in early, that's great. We just don't anticipate that that's going to meet a large scale incident But for now if there's individual exposures, I certainly think that the healthcare community is Very equipped to be able to deal with them rapidly You know tens of tens of people that's certainly something that they're they can jump into right away Yeah, but on those lines, I mean you mentioned earlier your talk about lymphenango and you know, I've done some study of that case You know, that's an individual obviously and it took a while to diagnose the problem for a while They thought it was phthalium poisoning. Yes And because it had very similar um symptoms, but um, and as you said, right Yeah, so we are we are relying and there are efforts in place to really make sure that Physicians are able to identify these kinds of injuries when they come up what we've seen most mostly what's been seen in humans has been cutaneous exposures, right? Radiation sources are all over the place. I don't think people recognize that there's a lot of industrial use of them Especially in for example, determining if concrete is appropriately cured. So you see these you hear about these things bouncing off the back of trucks in Australia They found it. It's amazing. I'm talking about things that are very very small But people sometimes pick them up. They put them in their pocket. They the most recent human exposures have been primarily cutaneous industrial accident type in situations And so we know a lot about those kinds of exposures and how those are treated and those are very individual cases So those people get very intensive care Which usually occurs in in Paris actually the Percy hospital In military hospital in Paris has a lot of these international cases that come in So we've seen a lot of those kinds of exposures and those people do receive intensive care But then you know when you when you're talking about something that Which you can go online It's very sobering to look at the numbers that could result from the kinds of new nuclear detonations We anticipate But what I like to add is that not everyone I mean if you're if you're live in outside the beltway For example, if you know the DC area, you're probably okay If you stay in your house and don't wander out into a potential fallout plume, right? So these are very survivable events and unfortunately most the people who are getting the super high doses are going to be impacted by other things You have in an urban environment fireballs overpressures You know glass shattering buildings falling on people, right? So those kinds of big events The people who are right in the core there's not a lot to be done for them and the people that are way outside They're probably fine, but there is a sort of a a band If you're looking at sort of when you think about those Hiroshima maps, you've got the hypocentering You've got the fans. So there are bands where a government Provided medical response can save lives. And so that's you know, what we what that's what our mission is I know our team thinks about this every day, you know, what are we doing today? That's moving this field forward so that we can get to the point where we're able to save more people Should something happen So it's not I don't want people to think it's all doom and gloom The government is making appropriate investments that these are cross government as I mentioned nasa's concerned about their astronauts They're investing in radiation. DoD is concerned about their troops. So there are a lot of It's a small research community, but we are well linked and so we do try to leverage investments across all of them So I think I think we're making nice progress So that's why I sleep. Okay at night Madeline did you have a question? I had a quick one. Um So I'm I'm fascinated by your Goal of having sort of the coven equivalent of a of a tester, right that people could could use But tell me how you're thinking about the con office or that because with a with the cova tester. It's very binary Yeah, you have it. Yes. I have it. No, I don't right, right? It's you get the two lines or you don't but on something for a radiation detector Yes, or no may or may not be meaningful. Yes. I have some exposure, but it's really That's why nothing is simple, right? You know, or yes, I have it and it's really high and I'm but I'm going to care a lot This is how do you think about it? And I think that the current approach has not been you have a test kit at home The current approach has been that you have What they call field field You can put things out in the field. They can be in a gymnasium. That's a triage center And those are yes. No type questions, right? Did you get exposed or not? And I think there are requirements for how quickly those answers have to come and how reliable they have to be So that's kind of like what I would call field care and then there's definitive care So you've identified someone who clearly is is has been exposed, right? Some of that's going to depend on what we know of their location and where things were happening So there's a lot of factors that go into that and those people then we try to take that next step and say, okay How much of an exposure did you receive? So there are different requirements for something that's sort of a hospital based assay as opposed to a field based assay And I don't think right now we're thinking that you're going to have a home based assay because I think the idea is this is a Boom it happens kind of thing and hopefully if it does it's not all happening in different cities all at the same time You know, these are things that we worry about And so but it's going to you're going to know exactly when that event happened And then the timeline starts for everybody from there So it's not like you're going to later develop a radiation exposure complication You know, maybe three days later, you're probably not going to be exposed to radiation three days later unless you are Ignoring public health guidance about not going out of your house for example So the idea is that you probably won't need a home test But you will need something that you can go to a triage location. You can go to your physician Maybe your physician is going to have some kind of access and we have been trying to leverage for example existing laboratory requirements and capabilities so For example, the funding we've provided at Columbia University in specific for their work on biotecometry has said, listen Can we work with quests or these other places that already process samples all the time? And maybe you'd be able to go to your doctor and your doctor could very quickly do an assay Send it off get a result, right? So that's we're trying to leverage what's already there And I think we learned a lot of lessons from covet about ways to make that more effective Um and to make it faster and to make it, you know better faster In the general sense like we've seen with what happened with covet I think also the good the population understands emergency use authorization Which when we would say eua faces would glaze people understand a lot more about how things happen The fda is not so much the black box Not to use a pun, but it's not so much behind the curtain people really understand how the fda functions now And I think that benefits both Both people who could be involved in this kind of incident who are like, oh my gosh Something may have happened I at least realize that there could be a an impact that I need to be concerned about and also the those individuals developing These approaches and identifying these these biomarkers of injury Thanks Thank you. Dr. Decarlo. That was fascinating. Thank you. We um We now have a five minute break. We will return at 10 to the hour And if anybody has any questions, you can uh type in hhs directory and put in my name and you can find us and reach out with questions Happy to answer this. Thank you again All right, we're back in session now. Um, we will now have a presentation on updates on the waste isolation pilot plant From is betsy foreign ash Who is the acting deputy director of the carlsbad field office of the united states department of energy? Good afternoon. Can you hear me? Okay Yes, we can betsy. Thank you Very good. I feel like I've talked to you guys a couple of times over the last few years and every time I talk to you I have a different title. So Um at the moment, it's the acting director at our carlsbad field office, which oversees Uh, the web so wanted to give you a quick update on What we've been doing what we're looking forward to doing and you know where we see Um issues and opportunities Next slide, please So I just want to underscore. I think it's something you all already appreciate, but you know whip is just so central to um The e.m. Mission if you look at our 2023 calendar year priorities or go back and look at the past couple years You'll see that there are whip actions that appear really prominently in the priorities In a direct way. So for example this year making progress on our ventilation system and utility shaft Shipments from different sites are explicitly identified But having whip operational and efficient also underlies the ability to achieve You know commitments and um regulatory milestones across a number of sites. So Even where you don't see it explicitly It's part of the picture for a number of other priorities Next please A few minutes to talk about what we've been Doing and accomplished in the recent past. So In calendar year 2022 we received almost 300 shipments true ways shipments from across the complex That includes about 75 from Los Alamos in New Mexico, which is a high priority for us We completed waste emplacement in panel seven and began emplacement in panel eight. So we've actually Just this week Completed our certification to state that the Full panel closure system is in place for panel seven. So that's official That it's closed now This transition is really important to us because um panel seven we still were dealing with contamination issues from the 2014 incident. So uh groups were in PPE. There were some restrictions on um access and Operations there in panel eight. We are out of the zone where there was contamination. And so We don't have to have the same level of PPE and the complexities and the operations were back You know to the normal clean mode of operation for whip, which makes a big difference for us We are um making progress also towards mining out additional dress that will provide access to the new west wing Where we have replacement panels 11 and 12 and that was a priority for us that we identified in 2022 so as a reminder panels 11 and 12 are um replacement panels for um space that was lost due to the 2014 incident so that was some space in panel seven As well as uh the drifts in between the existing panels that had originally been identified as potential locations For ways that we refer to that as panels nine and ten. That's why you have a discontinuity in the numbers We've completed installation of salt reduction units for the new safety significant Confinement ventilation system. That's a mouthful. I know But a reminder this we have two Two different parts of this new ventilation system. So One is a salt reduction facility. Um, that would be the first step in You know with air movement out and the second one is um a heap of filtration building I think it's six different banks of Filters that go through so um and either I mean the What this provides us is the capability to work on full keep a filtered ventilation In a to a level that will support simultaneous operations of mining and waste emplacement. So At the moment we have separate ventilation Um pathways and fans that we use for doing um mining Unfiltered and waste emplacement filtered this will allow us to do both of them at the same time And the configuration will actually allow us to use Either the salt reduction facility on its own or the heap of filtration on its own or Both as we um as we might need In terms of the utility shaft We've excavated um as of the end of last year to the 1300 foot level This is going to go all the way down to 21 50 feet, which is the level of Waste emplacement and it will serve it will hook into the west wing Where the new panels 11 and 12 are And it's also going to serve as the intake shaft for the To hook into the new ventilation system. I think As of last year we were at 1300 feet. I think now we're almost down to 1800 feet in that In the drilling for that We've safely transported 16 million cumulative miles. That's loaded miles not not just truck miles, but Waste miles and we're really proud of that safety record And we have recently completed a transition to a new M&O contractor at whip. That is simco Um transitioning from a nuclear waste partnership that had held the contract for the last few years. So We're really pleased with how that transition has gone Next please All right, so Moving on to you know, what we're working on now and looking forward In terms of whip and true ways that the first thing is just of course A comprehensive Look at not just the whip but at the generator sites at the processes we used to certify waste To prioritize insidual, you know, what waste is coming from where so that So that we're meeting commitments across the board We we have had some challenges with availability of commodities Like Some of the the overpack containers the standard waste boxes So that's something that we are paying attention to And then looking more closely at sharing lessons learned across the site. We're seeing for example that At the Idaho site, we have some challenges with aging You know aging drums and and how they fare In terms of container integrity and shipping and so we want to make sure You know, if we're seeing that at one site that other sites are aware of what's happening and What we can do to alleviate any concerns or issues We are continuing to work on a path forward for the land That is at waste control specialists This was waste that was shipped there to complete a Commitment to the state when the first incidents happened at whip in 2014 And then unfortunately we realized that some of the drums there have similar components and compatibility issues to the Drums that in the waste stream that were implicated in the whip incident. So we have actually been able to move a significant fraction of the waste out of there But we still have a number of Containers that have record codes on them and we've been looking at options for how we How we might be able to remove those codes either by looking More carefully at the current condition of the waste rather than the condition when those codes were assigned and And potential treatment options as well. So The state of Texas is really Interested in having us make progress on that. So it's also a high priority surplus plutonium disposition I knew the academy has had a long-standing interest in this so Operations the down blending operations at savannah river have been ongoing and we have accepted the first shipments of surplus plutonium at the whip from those operations. So it still is I would say a deliberate and Not speedy process at the moment We're looking at maybe one shipment a month coming from savannah river to whip on that Next please We have a number of really important regulatory activities that are happening Now or in the foreseeable future So first we are in the midst of a process to renew our rick repermit with the new mexico environment department They published a draft permit at the end of last year The comment period the public comment period on the draft permit closes tomorrow So we we will be submitting comments. They had a number of Changes and new conditions that were proposed. Some of them would pose operational challenges for us. Some of them would pose legal challenges or For us. So we'll be submitting a combination of comments, but expecting that won't be having you know, it's like Negotiations with the state to try to resolve those differences And alleviate the need for a hearing or Later in the process EPA we're also due for our periodic five year recertification. So they just finalized the decision on our 2019 submittal Last fall But we already are in the cycle to finalize conduct the performance assessment and finalize the application and documentation For our submittal in march of 2024. So There are still a few technical issues that were raised in the 2022 decision And we also are looking at if or how The modeling would reflect future panels Again, we are looking At getting permission for panels 11 and 12. You see them pointed out on the schematic. Like I said, that's the New wing out to the west If you look Partway down on the arrow that points to panel 11, you'll see that shaft number five That is the new utility shaft. That's the the air intake and we'll be serving it That's the one that we're in the midst of drilling. So The new mexico environment department has wrapped the permissions for panel 11 and 12 We had submitted that as a permit modification and they have wrapped that Decision into the permit renewal process For epa. We have yet to submit a plan change request to them on 11 and 12, but we are aiming To do that later this year And they they they'll need to do an evaluation of whether it can be considered As a plan change or whether there might need to be a rulemaking on that And then lastly again progress on the capital asset projects and mining That's the ventilation system the utility shaft and and those are all Important for being able to gain access to panel panels 11 and 12 Which will give us continuity We're you know, we really what we really want to avoid is a situation where we have panel eight filled and we have panels 11 and 12 Not yet available. Um, either physically from my perspective or, you know, regulatory from An authorization perspective from nmed or epa. So that's you know, that's what we're working towards If you look, you know, right now with going into panel eight, we are about a little over 40 percent Into the allowed Maximum capacity of whip under the land withdrawal act. So If you do the calculation, you can project out that and you look at our projected waste inventories You can project out that panels 11 and 12 On their own will also not get us fully to A land withdrawal act volume. So We are looking at You know What more will be needed in that regard and those will be wrapped in future plans NEPA analysis and regulatory submittals Next please So I guess what I want to end with is You know, we're we're proud of what we've been What we've been doing. Um, we think there are good opportunities With the a new contractor in place with what we've learned Over time we're taking steps now to make sure that you know to Rebuild that recapitalize our infrastructure to build the new ventilation system and utility shaft That will support with being able to fully Meet its mission, but I would say, you know to really support that Moving forward. There are a few things that we need to pay particular attention to so Um, one is that we need to strengthen our community and regulatory relationship. So if you see an Ike weight speak Um, recently, he's really emphasized the importance of alignment Um, and I think that's really about aligning our objectives with, um, regulatory requirements with community needs with state interests and Perspectives and being able to balance that, you know, not just across a site Or a waste stream but to balance that, um, you know across the state across multiple states To make sure that we're meeting all of the objectives New mexico is an absolutely crucial partner for us So, you know, we are working closely with them on the permit to make sure that we can craft something that Is implementable and realistic but recognizes their their particular needs And I would just say carlsbad is an incredibly supportive host community and we want to make sure that We maintain That relationship as well. I I mean, I have to say from, you know, coming out here It's one thing to hear people say and to see from dc that Carlsbad is supportive of it, but coming out here and seeing it in person Is it's really incredible to see the the level of engagement and support out here So we definitely don't want to lose that I would just say, you know, we we are looking at, um You know, we're looking at increasing our efficiency and I think There are there are a few different dimensions to it I mean one is that moving into panel eight really kind of automatically increases our efficiency for the reasons that I already talked about But we need to make sure that that, you know If we're able to do that then everything else that supports You know waste emplacement and that feeds into it Also is being done transparently And safely If we're going to be increasing the pay so that's mining ground control Worker awareness the availability of the supporting commodities and supply chain and Waste certification, right? I mean being able to in place waste does us no good if we don't have waste that's filling the pipeline so I mentioned a couple of challenges already that that we see in front of us one of those is supply chain issues another one is aging waste and A third one is, you know, that we are kind of down to smaller and more difficult Waste streams and getting the process knowledge To support characterization for those especially legacy waste streams Can be really challenging and you know the the issue that we're dealing with is It's almost the same amount of effort to do it no matter what the size of the waste stream is But it's harder, you know, it sort of gets progressively harder and harder To manage those resources when the payoff that we're getting at the end is a much smaller Waste stream. So I think what that's doing is driving us to take a step back And think a little bit more creatively about how we can, you know, how we can address it It it never means that we do it at the cost of sacrificing safety But I think it means that we need to question the status quo and go back and re-examine How we're doing things and figure out what really is contributing to safety. So We need to ask ourselves, you know Are the challenges that we faced when we put requirements in place still there or have they Evolved over time are the approaches that we're taking? Are they working for us? Are they providing the safety and meeting the objectives that we've laid out? Are we talking about what we've learned and applying it across our sites and across our program to make a difference? And you know, what is our risk tolerance and is it the same as it was? Or has it also evolved? So I think that's what we're that's what we're looking at. There are some ideas that are emerging That we think can help us to Be a little bit more creepy. One of them is centralized purchasing, which we already have but looking at different distribution and allocation schemes to Make sure that we're getting the resources to the sites the generator sites that need them when they need them We're considering mobile certification capacity for smaller sites or that we might be able to bring search capacity to bigger programs Taking measures to mitigate uncertainties and legacy waste and aging containers. So most obvious example would be overpacking some containers That just takes the you know, it it requires commodities, but it takes some burden off of your You know integrity inspections and such So I would say, you know, these these are not decisions that have been made But they're the kinds of things that we're trying to think about and we're able to make sure that Moving forward we're able to keep the pipeline full. We're able to continue in placing safely And we're able to do it hopefully more efficiently but not at the cost of safety So I'd be glad to take some questions if there are any Thank you very much for a very informative discussion More importantly, thank you for running a successful program in an area that is otherwise pretty fraught We'll turn to questions from the board and and academy staff Allison you you're first again Okay, sorry And thanks Betty and not at all. Sorry if I missed Some of what you said I was driving and I had you on my phone on this on zoom um Anyway, what we can do these days, right? um So, uh, so my question has to do with you know, I can't believe it's almost 10 years since Since the accident in 2014 Wow Where did that go? Um, but anyway, I wanted to hear more about what? um mechanisms that you have in place to ensure that doesn't happen again to ensure that, you know, organic materials are not put in these um these canisters, etc um Well, I mean we have the measures in place that were put in place when we Reopen when we restarted after the accident So, you know, there were significant changes that we made to the waste acceptance criteria and the waste certification process and it was um, you know partly about Well, I would say probably less about the physical characterizations that we do in terms of um, you know, rtr or things like that, um and uh, but put a lot of emphasis on a documentation of um chemical compatibility Uh, and so those requirements are all still in place. We had Much more documentation that was was required on the um the process knowledge Potential chemicals that could be in the waste streams We also put, you know, we we put in place some um requirements called generator site technical reviews um and that was those are intended to look not at the waste certification directly but at the upstream processes and generator sites to in terms of waste generation waste packaging um and some on documentation and and that was really meant to And sort of meant to do a couple that I mean one is it's just meant to increase awareness At the generator site because the people who are generating, you know, Especially if you're, you know, office of science and you know, these are new generation waste when we're looking upstream a lot of times And there are opportunities there To make improvements that can really help us downstream and you know, if you depending on how you know If you can video things if you can document your process knowledge differently that can really simplify it So it's meant to encourage that it was also I think a recognition of the fact that you know If you look at what happened in Los Alamos, right the workers knew there were issues I mean they they identified them and that you know, but that did not alleviate the problem And so part of what we do with this I think is, you know, kind of empowering providing that message to like empower people You know in the it's a safety culture issue From a regulatory perspective, I would say it's a safety culture issue and that yeah, absolutely Exactly and so that's another part of what you know, what that process is meant to do so that can that continues as well, so We're continuing all of those. I you know, but I do think you know, like I said, you know we had a huge amount of You know Discomfort and a need for reassurance when we were doing the restart at web You know totally understandable and justifiable and you know, we accept that that was what we needed to do to To be able to restart but I think you know We we did a lot of belt and suspenders things in our dsa For example when we were doing restart and and you know, that's something that I think we are going back and taking a look at You know, are they really you know We have a track record again for being able to do Waste and placement and we want to go back and look at the things that we're putting in They're really meaningful in terms of the payoff that they're giving us, especially if they're making for more complex Operations that you know and gender other risks in terms of you know, worker safety or leaving sites and things like that. So that's part of the balance that we're trying to re-examine now And are there Are you you know from my point of view as a former nrc person? Are you guys doing more regular inspections? You know, it seemed to me that that was a that was an oversight an area of missed oversight that there weren't regular inspections being done of the Packaging of these materials, etc We do. I mean we have requirements to go out and do annual recertifications At the waste generator sites and look at their operations. So We we continue to do that the EPA and the NMED both Are able to participate in those as well So we're continuing to do that Oh shoot, I just had something else on the side of my mind that went out My mind in that 10 seconds. But yes, we we are continuing to to do those Okay, great. Thank you. Thanks. Yep Charles Yeah, Betsy, thank you very much. That was really excellent presentation and like Allison I want to congratulate you and your team, you know to state the obvious, you know whip is The only you know deep geologic repository that's operating in the world so Thinking about relationships and I know that The carlsbad community is very supportive Of whip and and that and I don't know if you caught paul blacks presentation at the beginning of open session But paul mentioned that and he said that, you know, it really boils down the values, you know, what do What what do the community? What do they value? What do the people community really want? What are their what are their goals? And he talked about it in terms of structure decision-making and he said one of the main reasons why we have whip Operating is because you have such strong support from the community. So other communities. I've been thinking of I asked our previous speaker a question about international partnerships and and you know international Counterparts and interests, you know, dr. Carla's work and her team with radioactive You know medical countermeasures and dealing with radioactive emergencies, but I think You know whip is such an outstanding example And especially thinking about what the conversation just had with allison You know lessons learned from the 2014 incident. Are you are you hosting? Are you you having you know people from other countries? Come to whip or talk to you and your colleagues and try to understand how they can apply Those lessons in terms of risk management and putting in place safety measures and how to recover from the event like that And then get back to successful type of operations. So that's kind of my first Question area and the second one is also about relationships You probably remember faculty academies. This was over three years ago. We did our Report on the loot disposable tonium and disposal and whip and I remember one of the public presentations We showed some maps of oil and gas drilling in the region and some also kind of wondering What types of relationships do you and your team have with the oil and gas industry in the area? And Not that I'm worried that there's going to be, you know, they're going to right now like drill into your Disposal site but terms of terms of thinking about the footprint of oil and gas and What kinds of communications you have with those those with that industry? Thank you Okay, so first part of the question Yes, we do have a lot of engagement internationally So we have I think I've only been out here for a couple of months, but I think in the time that I've been here We've had Folks from France folks from IAEA visiting Somebody from Britain as well. So tons of interest internationally in seeing what we do seeing the facility understanding how you know, we were able to Well, how we operate but also the history of how we were able to get permission and and what we do to Demonstrate the safety case. So I think also there's a lot of interest Right. I mean as one of the few operating facilities What are lessons learned in terms of how you integrate the considerations of long-term performance and safety with operational considerations? What we've learned in that regard. I think is also a really great interest. I mean, there's only a couple of other facilities that are, you know I mean France has some lessons in that regard, Finland as well That we can combine but but we really have a unique perspective. I think Um, I would just say that that kind of confidence that you get and the understanding of the system By taking You know the international visitors down there I mean, I see it when when we take anybody down here, right? We had folks from NNSA Even within the department who came and did a tour and you can see it on people's faces when they see what the underground looks like When they understand what were You know What it actually looks like how clean it is how big it is How we manage, you know, how the operations actually work I think you get a much different appreciation for what we're doing What it means what the safety aspects are so it's not, you know, it's it's a value across the board as far as i'm concerned for people to be able to see the facility Um in terms of your second question on the relationships and oil and gas I have to admit I don't know that's one of the I can try to find out We certainly have an awareness of the, you know, the oil and gas drilling that happens Um, it's prohibited on the, you know, the land withdrawal area And we do have processes in place to do instances. Um, both on the ground and of Drilling records and we have relationships with the state to ensure that there are, you know, are not any Permits that are issued for drilling that could Dick it violate that requirement, but I don't know. Um, I don't know what our direct interaction is with the oil and gas folks And oh, but actually I go back to Allison's question because I remember the thought that went out of my head, which is um Which is to say that the contract transition to my mind is actually an incredible opportunity to revisit what we are doing to make sure that we are Living up to the commitments and the requirements that we have in place for Across the board waste certification, but also operational activities because my Experience and the time I've been here is that they are they are taking a really close look at everything that was in place To make sure that again make sure that it's doing what it's intended and think about what more We need to do to ensure safety Thank you pair Yes, let's see I I want to reemphasize how absolutely wonderful it is to to have this update on whip and the amazing progress the fact that that uh, the You know that you have this demonstration that it is feasible to manage nuclear waste safely and place it into disposal In the back of my mind is the fact that that sometime in the coming decade or so We need to restart a functioning civilian nuclear waste program And that the set of examples that have been provided here Are going to be very important. Uh, we need a new regulation Is one of the starting places and then congressional guidance So so my my question actually relates to something you didn't talk a lot about but which people worry about for civilian spent fuel transportation, which is Are spent fuel, which is the transportation part and having having whip operating and bringing in materials from distant places around the country proves provide some existence proof That this can be done safely. Could could you give a bit of an update on on how transportation is going? and Maybe thoughts about what that implies about our ability more generally to to to move materials radioactive materials around safely Yeah, um, I mean, I think I mentioned we have we just passed 16 million, you know Loaded miles um safe transportation. So really proud of the program. I think, um, you know, it's I do think it's right. I mean, it's like Like the repository itself. It's one of the few operational examples We have, you know, not in just in the u.s. But in the world of a shipping program on this scale and I think that It is really important that we have the nrc certification. I think that that provides a level of of oversight and You know that that is really important to people but You know, the requirements that we have in place for our system are really incredible I think somebody was talking about the requirements that the drivers need to go through in order to be qualified and you know It's a lot, you know, it's it's hundreds of hours of You know, driving with no marks on their driving records and no accidents and incidents It's training that they have to go through its requirements for, um, you know Being able to, you know, have multiple drivers on a single truck. We have designated safe areas So if they ever run into an incident, you know, we have locations that are identified along the routes with, you know, local Police and fire departments or, you know, other secure Places where the trucks can pull off the road and have a safe haven if needed So there are a ton of things that go into the transportation program that I think are maybe not as visible to people But are actually really important in ensuring that we have some resilience in that system and kind of defense in depth Um, for dealing with any accidents. I do think that our public outreach on the Program is really important as well. We do a lot of work along the, um, the trucking routes to, um, to train local first responders But also just to take the trucks out and, um And talk to people in the communities and we call them road shows, you know, we take the truck out We let people see, you know, what's on it talk to the people who drive the trucks talk to the people who You know, release the trucks and and I think that makes a big difference and the last thing I would say is You know, we're also really flexible and that's something that you need to be able to do when you're doing shipping to adapt to The conditions that you're actually seeing on the road to make sure that the routes that you have Are clear to make sure that the roads are in decent condition that there aren't events that are happening and you know, we adjust our Shipping on, you know, not just a weekly basis, but a daily basis to, you know, if needed I'm gonna tell you, I know there's a huge challenge in that regard. There's, you know, dude There's a lot of shipments they get pushed by a few days because, you know, the road's close because of snow or something But, you know, but we do it we do not send trucks out if it's not going to be safe or, you know If the weather looks iffy and I think that's part of what you also need to be willing to do to to be safe and to build public confidence Thank you very much and congratulations. Um, I think it's time now to turn to our next presentation Um on the future of the radiation workforce by Dr. Wayne Newhauser, who is the Charles M. Smith chair in medical physics in the department of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University and the director of the medical physics program Dr. Newhauser, thank you, Charles. Can you hear me? Yes, we can Wayne. Thank you. Great. Thanks for that kind introduction and thanks to the uh, committee for inviting me to present on the workforce today. We really appreciate the chance to present on this Being aware of the lateness of the day for those of you on the west coast and points for the west I'll be brief in my presentation today I'd like to start by thanking quite a few people. We had a really great team working on this. There were teams started out with about 60 people Um, they're listed here by the profession specific areas they they came from. These are national and internationally recognized leaders in their fields. I'd like to call out Jackie Williams by name She not only led the radiation biology group, but she was my co-leader of the overall effort I'd also like to thank John voice who instigated this work So for this audience, it almost goes without saying that we need a workforce that's adequate in size and capacity in order to meet our nation's needs in health care electric power generation nuclear propulsion for navy's vessels Defense space exploration and so forth and the good news is of course that us has invested heavily and we have a fabulous community of professionals in place that's dedicated to the safe and beneficial use of radiation But starting perhaps in the early 90s there were signs that the future adequacy was was in jeopardy and in fact in the last 10 years There have been numerous indicators of this Including some studies by the american association for the advancement of science government accounting office health physics society Your organization national academies Did a report on radiation chemistry around 2012 and more recently the ncrp published a statement regarding this So what what would be causing this And is it unique to the radiation professions? No, it's not unique to the radiation professions. Basically all of our industries Are dependent on the and influenced by the demographics of the of the u.s population So here you can see our population in the mid 1970s mid 2010s and a projection out to the mid 2050s The principal feature that you see here that's relevant to the workforce is you've got a large cohort of young baby boomers In the workforce entering the workforce in the mid 70s We're now in the midst of an unprecedented wave of retirement of these folks now so the demographic looks quite different and Things will the population will presumably continue to grow in age according to projections going into The decades Next several decades in the future So this is one of the major underlying forces at play in the workforce situation So the john boyce initiated and ran a Workshop on the radiation workforce called work. Where are the radiation professionals? This was held in in 2013 and to summarize some of the key findings from that workshop They reported that There were adequate supplies of radiation professionals for some professions For the next five to ten years meaning leading out to to the present day um, only two areas were identified with Certainty of having adequacy Of personnel in the short term and those were medical physics and nuclear power But over the longer horizon 10 to 20 years they felt that the projections Revealed that there would be insufficient numbers of of replacements for all of the baby boomers who were retiring and this was then Published Two years later That is the the workshop in the form of a statement ncrp statement 12 was published in 2015 So in the in the statement i'll i'll just share with you two quick quotes because they're particularly relevant here and they the statement pointed out that the us is on the verge of a severe shortfall of Radiation professionals such that urgent national needs will not be met Projected shortfalls will adversely affect the public health radiation occupations emergency preparedness And the environment so these are quite quite dire warnings and this Was a clarion call for more action And indeed was an instigating factor in the present workforce study that i'll present next So this study was a all-volunteer effort we gathered up about 60 experts from around the country who are leaders in their fields The team tried to exclusively use published literature in many cases that wasn't available in which case we did use some unpublished data Where that wasn't available. We relied on expert opinion and we limited our speculation to Just the future outlook where of course that's inherently speculative We never convened so we have no group photo all of our meetings were done electronically most of our business was done using online collaboration tools and We really the methods we set them up to address three particular topics What is the current status of the workforce once it's future outlook? And what are some actions that we could recommend to ensure future adequacy of the workforce? Depending on how you want to do the accounting This was about a six or eight year project cradle to grave We spent a full year in the beginning trying to figure out how to tackle the problem how to organize ourselves What questions to Address most urgently and so forth then we spent about four years doing the actual research Took a long time to generate consensus among the the writing teams and the the group as a whole And then we got to work writing and that took about four years in total Then we got slowed down by the pandemic a bit and what should have been a few months wound up being about two years because we were busy dealing with other things And then 2022 was really just a pretty light year spent working with a publishing house to get the study published What we came up with in terms of a report is a 60 page Summary well 60 page report. It's a special issue of an open access journal and I've included a link here You can download this for free on your own the study has eight components Beginning with an introduction setting the stage then we have profession specific chapters on health physics medical physics medicine including four of the most heavy subspecialty users of ionizing radiation nuclear engineering radio biology radio chemistry And then we conclude with a synthesis of all of this and try to look at the radiation professions not only individually But as an interdependent ecosystem and we provide some globally applicable recommendations so in the interest of time and brevity I picked out two recommendations Two observations really to to share with you There are many more but i'm going to limit it to two here and the first one was that um really without exception we found that there were significant limitations in Our ability to even determine what the current status Of of these professions were much less temporal trends or predictions of Of the future and this was somewhat counter to our expectations. We knew it wasn't going to be an exact science but we weren't prepared for the um The general incompleteness and heterogeneity of the data that we actually found when we when we did our rigorous literature searches The second finding I thought I'd point out here was that the The current status and future outlook of the professions involved in radiation protection varied considerably depending on specialty subspecialty and other factors um This also was a surprise to us. We we knew going into it that that the radiation professions Are not a monolith But we under-appreciated initially how complex and heterogeneous this ecosystem of of distinct professions really is This is a table that Comes from the summary chapter and we won't go through all of this But I just wanted to show this to you to give you a sense of Of the kind of information that's in this report. So let's look at just the top row here um The the size of a profession is one of its general characteristics that that we would expect would be quite well known And in fact for the the mature Uh And and very established profession of health physics We really weren't able to bracket the number of professional health physicists working in the united states Um, uh, within a small bracket the the best estimate is somewhere between thirty two hundred and seven thousand Um for medical physics, it was a little bit easier. They're about eight thousand Uh for the four specialties that we looked at in medicines nearly forty thousand For nuclear engineering about eighteen thousand radio biology just five hundred or so and for radiation, uh And nuclear chemistry The team was not able to even make an estimate So even from this most general characteristic about the radiation workforce, which is its size You see that there's about a hundred factor of a hundred variation in the size and for two of at least two of the Professions we had a very limited of uh Information upon which to even base an estimate So I won't go into the the rest of the contents of this table other than to try to Um summarize that in terms of my interpretation of the future outlook. This isn't contained in the report But let's look at that And so if you look at all of these I would say that the future outlook for health physics is poor It's good for medical physics medicine and nuclear engineering But poor for radiation biology and probably poor for oops radiation chemistry and so the hallmarks of a poor prognosis, let's say are a small Number of of professionals working in that area combined with Uh a shrinking uh downward trend in the number combined with Pipeline education pipeline that's in jeopardy of of collapse So after uh, as I said about six years or so 50 people Six professions we came up with four recommendations that appeared to be consensus recommendations that are Applicable to all of the profession. So just briefly go through those with you here One was to initiate or enhance annual surveillance of radiation professionals. So some of the Professions have none no surveillance going on at all Um, whereas others, uh, for example in radiology where it's probably the most advanced There were even many things that are not currently data items that are not currently being collected that would be useful in in monitoring the workforce We'd also like to see more fostering of cooperation between the professions coordination and harmonization Additional advocacy obviously to obtain more sustained funding for higher education and research and we would also like to see more Additional outreach activities in order to attract the best and the brightest students To become the future workers in each of these in each of these disciplines So with that, I'll close and take any questions you may have Thank you very much. Um, I will jump in with the first question because it's fresh in my mind from One of the last things you said you cited six job categories three of which had poor prospects three of which had good prospects and I just wondered if there were any and and you characterized sort of attributes to them that indicated why they were good or they were poor, but those may be more symptoms than cause Were there their causes that were for the distinction between the two? Because I imagine that they may have you know, actually a great deal in common So what were the differences that caused that distinction? Well, there were some common themes. Um, and there were some, uh I'd say rather Distinct causes as well. So some common themes were A career path is has to be visible to those entering the profession And if you don't have enough entering the profession It becomes hard for the pipeline to Education pipeline to sustain itself And then if there's not enough entry level workers Um, for example in the case of health physics, I've heard many instances where employers aren't able to find a health physicist And so they will instead hire an industrial hygienist and and and train them up as best they can to fulfill the role of a of a traditional health physicist And this sort of thing was also common to radiation biology But but there I think it was driven by a couple of of distinct factors as I understand it the Traditional radio biology came from in vivo and in vitro Experimental work and as as the biologic research Technologies have have exploded with you know everything from genetic sequencing immunology, etc Now the the Folks who are interested in radiation and biology are coming from a much more diverse set of of Areas of biology and this tends to diminish the sort of the core The critical mass if you will of a of a traditional radiation biology program And also it it It diminishes the ability for the the Traditional field of radiation biology to sustain itself as an identifiable profession and then it When that happens then You know there's there's then the common problem to health physics Which is attracting the best and the brightest to go into the field if if the field looks like it it may be in in danger of of demise Thank you, Charles Wayne thank you. Thank you very much. That was a very interesting presentation and I know you just kind of scratched the surface with findings recommended actions so i'm going to Raise um, I don't got sound like a brook record. I love to think internationally a lot of think about the globe and so i'm going to ask questions about Uh, did your your group and your study Look at the international dimension and thinking about at least a couple different ways So anecdotally, I I know of maybe a few colleagues who Are nuclear chemists in particular who were Trained or born outside the united states primarily trained outside united states And then we're attracted to come to united states because of job opportunities and have now Some of you know stayed become u.s citizens stayed within the u.s Working here now and you know that's helped Certainly, uh the us radiation workforce and so i'm just thinking about um Any data on the state of play in other countries and their programs and training these professions and also the opportunities You know what we have in our country or where we should have to keep attracting You know talented people From other countries to consider coming and working united states and making sure our radiation profession workforce Is uh at the standards it should be Thanks. Yeah, those are those are all excellent points and and the answer is uh, yes, no and some So yes, we did consider the the international aspect In the sense that uh the elasticity of supply is enhanced by a pool of qualified professionals from From abroad, uh, whether they're students entering the profession or fully qualified senior folks We we didn't really go too much beyond that because we wanted to focus on the domestic situation Which is was was already complicated enough The the team did like the idea of Trying to work with our international partners both in research education, etc pooling resources where Where it makes makes sense to do so Learning from just for example, our our european partners in in urodos do a phenomenal job of of integrating workforce development into their radiation dosimetry research programs, so there's there's there's some of that i think um Shaheen duji actually was was involved in organizing of a research workshop at at uh, uh oak ridge that delved into this a little bit. Um, so We we didn't get as far into it as we would have liked to have and there's and there's more potential for that I don't think that it's a like a bottleneck. Uh, I think that there are enough well qualified Students to be attracted to the field regardless of where they come from. I think the the the major concerns lie elsewhere Shaheen since uh, your name was mentioned. Do you uh, do you have a two finger response? And she he's a good example of someone from canada who's working in the united states Yes, um so so just to dovetail a little bit on on Wayne's reference to the study that we conducted in 2017 actually in response to war um, I had a an interesting challenge with to john boyce regarding workforce development in that Maybe we should be a little more nuanced instead of just warm body to warm body Let's add an element of dimensionality regarding Research needs and priorities. And so I could see this workforce study also addressing now looking at current, uh policy goals Time at change goals nuclear security goals many of the items that this board is interested in also in the framework of a workforce and capabilities need And uh, if you're interested in that report from 2017 it was an orn l document and I I can Pull it up and put it in the chat, but it's freely available if you google it Thank you paul Yeah, you know What a difference five years makes because I've been in meetings just in the last few months in which Both the doe and the new industry People are saying they we need to add 300 000 jobs in the nuclear field by 2050 And two of the areas that they're emphasizing specifically are health physics and nuclear chemistry so, you know, uh, obviously this is being driven by by the The interest in in adding new nuclear In in the u.s. And and particularly some of these smaller reactor vendors who were developing this area And I would point out that this is this is a broader group not just Uh, um, not just a college educated but also in technician area too. So so anyway, this that's kind of interesting So we're 2018 five years later now now we're having a a different view of the future for these job Category so I'm wondering are you going to try to do this again because I think your Point you raise is there's nobody really within those industry groups that really is kind of monitoring this effort Is that correct? Is that what I heard you say? Yes, paul. Thank you. That's a really good point and Uh, I I do think that um, well, I to your first point I should note that that really truth be told because of the lag time of Of the collection and publication of data Uh, that we used and then the lag time of the publication of our report Really our report should be viewed as a Immediate pre-pandemic snapshot So things things have changed quite quite a bit since 2020 Just to underscore your your point about how how quickly things can can change That said the long-term trends are clear is we're going to need to pay much closer attention to this And and yes to answer your second question. I think Much more can and should be done Um, some of the professions are doing a good job at surveying their members as as best they can But they're really um in my experience with this None of these these folks are all like us. They're not labor economists Um, they have their day jobs And so this is something that that they they do as a volunteer There's typically an annual survey for those professions that have a professional society that that that feels that they're You know, it's important to do which which wasn't all of them and so there's But That that doesn't mean that they're unimportant or shouldn't be counted I mean, you know if if the weakest link in a in a chain breaks the whole chain breaks Right, so we need radiation chemistry. We need health physics. And if these are a radiobiology if these fields are small As a as a radiation professions ecosystem. We're still highly dependent on them. So it it is incumbent upon us to Surveil them and and revisit this. I think, you know, having some Doing a decadal Workforce study I would think would be a minimum I think it's a little bit easier to do this if there's something Going on annually and then perhaps every several years if the situation Has has evolved enough come out with a you know, a new update or a guidance or publication But certainly making rational informed Decisions along the lines of what what paul black was talking about earlier. It requires having some Some accurate up-to-date input data upon which to To make those decisions Thank you, Amy Yeah, um, thank you wane and for spending all your spare time on that report as well It's really impressive piece of work And and really informative as well So I was curious though about the field of Public health radiation protection workers Which were they within one of your one of those categories? Or was there some reason for not considering them? I would imagine they're even Smaller number than than radio biologists Yes, Amy. Hi. Thank thank you for that question. We did have You'll be happy to know that there actually is a Corresponding piece on radiation epidemiology That team felt it would be better to publish in the health physics journal to my knowledge that hasn't appeared in in Hasn't been published yet, but I think it will be very soon That was a part of it and more generally to your question. There's there's many additional workers for example radiation technologists of various sorts health physics texts therapy texts, etc and These you know are in the hundreds of thousands so in terms of including additional professions who would be relevant to say emergency response It would be extremely important to include these in a in a future study The only reason why we didn't include them was Just bandwidth and already we started the team with about 60 workers. Sorry 60 workers 60 volunteers and That was a handful. So I think that that it should be expanded out to and especially to include the cohorts that are Relevance to public health and emergency response Okay. Oh, thank you. I didn't know about the other activities. So that sounds like an important report as well and so just another comment and within Some of the other national academy boards there have been discussions similar discussions about shortage of Scientists and projected future problems in the field as well Charles and I were in a cross board meeting When that was being discussed. So I wonder if it's helpful to to learn a bit of I think there's probably some similarities in in in some of the areas in terms of the underlying training and whether particularly given how much effort it is to to To monitor this and produce these sorts of reports, but also then to think about some potential solutions whether thinking about some cross Cross board cross application initiatives might be helpful Um, Charles to remember Yeah, sorry when I was just Charles and I were in a particular meeting and I'm trying to remember now What the other board was that was raising similar concerns I I would tend to agree with that that that looking at multiple disciplines is is actually in in many ways makes it easier um, and ultimately we Will succeed or or fail together. So certainly from the standpoint of ensuring adequacy of the entire Tire ecosystem it has some advantages. Yes, absolutely. Charles. Sorry, I interrupted Oh No way, and that's helpful. And I'm glad Amy brought that up because she's referring to our divisions advisory committee meeting and Earlier this morning. We had our division executive director Elizabeth Ada in the room and part of her efforts is to get this Um Conversation going among the different boards in our division. We have 11 different boards or units within the division on earth and life studies So we cover everything from life science life studies So biology, you know, of course chemistry and that's the other other board I manage So, you know, we're talking about nuclear chemistry and Wayne and our preparatory call If they get ready for this meeting You and I talked a bit about the study that was done, uh, I guess 10 11 years or so ago On the nuclear chemistry radio chemistry workforce And that was the collaboration between two of our boards this nuclear radiation studies board We're talking at now and the board on chemical sciences and technology the other board That I manage and so it might be worth, you know revisiting that but I think Amy's larger point I think we're seeing across the board. I think it's because one of your initial slides You hit the nail on the head thinking about the demographics Certainly in the united states and I think in other countries as well, especially in the developed world where we see we have that the baby boom and now, uh, you know They're moving through into retirement and so that's having significant changes in the workforce And not just in radiation health, but many many professions I agree on all points Madeline Thanks. Well, I you yeah, you may actually have answered part of the question And it really was to your recommendation on surveillance um, one of the One of the things that I've um always have found interesting is is There are lots of concerns about the inadequacy of the workforce writ large one of the things that I have also um seen not well Um, sort of organized or presented is how do you assess what the requirement really is over what period of time? And you mentioned that to katal workforce study and that might be something that you would suggest Be included in that as well, but that's that's sort of the flip side if we're not enough and it's like well How do you know when we have enough? Thanks Absolutely, so Delineating supply and demand are are two very very separate and equally important questions and so What we what we found in the course of this was was that many of us who are You know, we consider ourselves experts But we weren't even familiar with all of the terminology that's used to describe many of these professionals So I think health physics is a good example where there's a half dozen or so terms that can be applied to people who who Are professionals and work on radiation protection ranging from Health physicists to radiation protection manager and when you're trying to surveil or assess The state of affairs in these it it becomes difficult just just as an example this afternoon I got a A job posting and sometimes we use job postings to try to estimate the changes in in demand And the the posting was for a medical physics physicist a health physicist or a nuclear engineer. Um, so It's there's a lot of overlap The fields of medical physics and health physics, which are distinct and separate both have subspecialties called medical health physics so Yes, we need to work on that and a decadal study would be a great place to do that Lawrence A great. Thanks very much Wayne excellent presentation, and I really encourage folks to go to the jc a jcamp Open access for all of the details And and I think the where are the radiation professionals question or the warp question is important As everyone has discussed, but I think just as in textiles where you have the warp in the weft I think we also in this country have an issue where where we could ask where are the radiation facilities You know, you need training facilities to develop individuals and uh, you know, if you just look at the history of of each of the, uh You know small reactors for that were at universities. Most of those are gone Where we're blessed, I guess you could say as a country to at least have the facilities at afri and at at some of the labs but I I think a maybe an area that and The academies could look at kind of the interplay between the both of those Both the the equipment and facilities and technologies As well as the individuals. I think they go hand in hand That's it's absolutely correct. Thanks larry for that and more generally I would say that the facilities are are part and parcel of an institution And much of the early training is done by by universities And there's about 1.3 million missing students since the start of the pandemic And this is moving forward in time a long predicted enrollment crisis, which will put Um, institutions of higher education under additional stress um, a typical response to Uh financial stress is find out the small expensive programs that are losing money and cut them And so in addition to a potential die-off of large numbers of Of institutions of higher education The the smaller niche programs are particularly vulnerable your your point is very well taken and um, should should should be Considered in in the consideration of the institutional well-being as well Related to that question and answer I would note that several years ago. I was on an academies committee that um was really um aimed at Assessing efforts to refuel highly enriched research reactors to low-enrich fuel But our first recommendation as a committee was that the united states should inventory neutron Needs and sources over a 50-year period to enable there to be planning because it's a It's a highly decentralized system with lots of different players both providing and demanding neutrons Excellent point Would that be allowed with increased controls? I'm sorry. I didn't I didn't quite understand Oh, just getting some of the information on isotopic sources as I understand it has become More difficult with uh, the recent increased regulatory controls Uh, well, I I'm I'm not familiar with the details of the regulation But our proposal was that the government should do this so I assume that there were well, they probably have that information already Anyway, yes, it's excellent idea They hadn't as at least as of the study committee. They hadn't really assembled it And they didn't have a good projection into the future even they didn't have actually current data on either of those things But they certainly didn't have good projections Long into the future and of course these facilities last for decades and require a long time to build Yes I don't see any other questions unless there are further ones in the in the room Well, then um, it only remains to thank you very much for a great presentation and you generated lots of questions and had Interesting answers. So, uh, thank you again. And with that, I will call this session adjourned Thanks so much. Thanks for having me