 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the executive director of the environmental and energy study Institute and on behalf of the ESI, I'm happy to welcome you to this afternoon's briefing on a topic that is very important and that affects most congressional districts across this country. Our topic this afternoon is decommissioning a new era in the US nuclear power industry and a critical need for congressional oversight. So you will hear from a wonderful panel of experts taking a look at this whole issue. EESI was formed back in 1984 by a bipartisan congressional caucus, the purpose of which was to provide very credible and timely information on energy and environmental issues to members of Congress, to their staffs, and to also look and help develop bipartisan policy solutions that are common sense power solutions. So I am going to now turn over the podium to our moderator for today, Mary Olson, who is the director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service Office for the Southeast. Mary. Thank you. And I would like to start by thanking EESI for hosting us today. And I also have some other generous folks to thank as well. Beyond Nuclear, Hudson Sloup Clearwater, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Energy Information Service, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and the Samuel Lawrence Foundation, as well as so many other public interest organizations, large and small, working to make decommissioning safer. Decommissioning is the process of dismantling enormous nuclear structures, securing radioactive waste, and lowering the site's residual radioactivity. The highly radioactive fuel rods pose a hazard for over 50,000 human generations, and that's a technical number, 50,000. Getting it right now is critical for health and safety. Getting it wrong could pose existential threats. We have a panel of six distinguished public servants to unfold these issues. Their bios and other briefing materials are in your packets and will be posted on EESI.org, along with the video of today's event. We ask that you have questions. We're trying to start a dialogue and discussion on these issues, but we also ask that you hold them to the end of the presentations. And so, our first speaker is the Honorable Greg Yatsko, former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Greg? Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you to all the groups that Mary talked about for bringing us here. I'm going to hopefully tee this off with some big picture issues and picture topics, and I think you'll hear from the others and more specifics. But I thought I would start just with, and I hope you all can see this. It's not the best rendition, but I thought I'd start here with just the reason why we're here today. If you look at this chart on the wall, you can see there are three different curves. There's a blue one, a gray one, and a light blue one. The blue one is the nuclear industry if there had never been something called license extension. So nuclear power plants were originally licensed for 40 years. From 40 years from the time they were licensed, those licenses would be ending along that blue curve. And you can see that that time period begins basically now. So without license extensions, most of the reactor fleet would be in a process of decommissioning. And in the 90s, that was really the focus and the intention of most of the policy work in this area. But what's happening today is that most of the plants are essentially following that gray path, which is essentially the first-lice extension. And that essentially shows you a process, and this would be essentially a reflection of the number of plants that are operating and then that are shutting down over time. And you can see that in about 2030, we start down this very precipitous path of plant closures. And that means all the plants are going to be entering the process of decommissioning. So that other graph on the far right would represent what would happen if we were to grant an additional license extension to plants. But that is very, very unlikely. So decommissioning is really the future of this industry. It's not a growth industry right now. It's an industry that's in contraction from an operations perspective, which means that from a decommissioning perspective, there's going to be a lot of growth. So why we're here, the economics and to a certain degree, poor performance are making it harder for existing nuclear units to compete in competitive wholesale electricity markets. And that's about half the plant. And just in general, it's expensive to operate nuclear reactors. There are two new plants under construction, so those may come online in the next several years. But right now we're looking at about 198 plants today. So two is certainly not going to do anything to change what I showed you on the last slide. So decommissioning will become the dominant policy and operational issue for the nuclear industry really over the next decade, really next several decades. The only thing that would change that really is if we did this wholesale second life extension, but right now it does not appear that that would be very viable, or something very significant changes just in general with the electricity industry. And again, that's not likely to transpire. So there's really what I would call two-and-a-half key issues for decommissioning. There's the decommissioning of the plant itself, so the actual cleanup. And then there's the issue of what to do with the spent fuel. So the spent fuel is the fuel that was used to power the reactor, which as you heard is very hazardous for long, long periods of time, hundreds of thousands to millions of years. So that is really in and of itself a very separate issue. The one thing happens on the timeframe of decades, the other thing happens on the timeframe of hundreds of thousands of years. So those are two very, very different challenges from the decommissioning perspective. And I'll touch on a couple of key policy issues for each of those to hopefully kick off this discussion. Of course, whenever you're going to do a massive cleanup and a nuclear power plant cleanup is a very expensive process, you need money to do that. Well, in one of the really unique foresights of the nuclear industry or of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, all nuclear power plants have been required or are required to set aside sufficient funds to do the decommissioning. And I will say that with a caveat to do the nuclear decommissioning. Some plants do require decommissioning for kind of standard industrial pollutants, and that's not covered by these funding, but nonetheless the bulk of the funding for a plant cleanup is already covered by funds that exist. So there are two types basically of plants in the country. There are plants that operate in deregulated electricity markets and plants that operate in traditional rate regulated electricity markets. And in those deregulated markets, in principle, the plants have to have the full amount of decommissioning set aside at all times. The regulated plants, they operate in a place where they can always charge rate payers more money to accumulate funds to pay for the decommissioning. So when we look at that issue, of course, the biggest question then going forward, and especially as we look to this massive transition from plant operation to plant decommissioning, are there sufficient funds to do the cleanup? Right now, the answer I would say is probably based on our experience with plant decommissioning in the past, but it does certainly raise a question about what happens if those funds run out. So today when we're generally operating and seeing decommissioning, it's usually a company that has other nuclear reactors or still continues to operate in an electric power company with other assets and other business lines. So certainly if they lose funds for their decommissioning, there are other ways to do that. But when you were looking 30, 40, 50, 60 years into the future, the companies today that operate nuclear reactors may not necessarily exist in the way that they are today. And so this issue of funding becomes something to watch out for. But there is a fund set aside to deal with that. And there are lots of unique policy issues related to that that hopefully we'll get into in a discussion here. Another aspect really is the cleanup itself and the timeframe on which you do that. Under Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations, plants have basically up to 60 years to complete the decommissioning process and something that's called SafeStore. There's some very specific financial reasons why they do that because it allows them to grow these funds that they would use for decommissioning, to accumulate additional resources, and in principle allows for some of the radiation to be reduced at the site, which would make it easier for the workers and ultimately for the decommissioning work to reduce the radiation exposure. But from the most part on that last issue, you really get most of those benefits within about 10 to 15 years. So 60 years is really a long period of time. If you think about a nuclear power plant, if you have a district with a plant in it, and you think about trying to reuse that, 60 years is a very, very long period of time. So that's really one of the issues that people are looking at. And right now what we're actually seeing is there's a market reaction to trying to address this issue. Given the fact that you have these large decommissioning funds, and given the fact that you have communities very interested in earlier decommissioning, what's happening now is you have companies that are coming in and offering to buy the reactors from the plant operators in order to decommission them. And the idea behind that is that they know that there's this very large fund, and if they can decommission for less than what is in that fund, then essentially they can make a nice profit. So it's a model that's starting to develop that in principle has a lot of good benefits to it. Number one, you get earlier cleanup. Potentially you save some money in the process. Now, however, there are some challenges with that, and there's a couple of issues that I raised there. Number one, can the cleanup actually be done for less money than exists in these decommissioning funds? Now, certainly I think the funds are sufficient to cover the cost of the cleanup, but I'm not sure that they're sufficient to cover the cost of the cleanup and a very nice leftover benefit for the company that does the decommissioning. The other thing to keep in mind is that these new companies that are coming in to buy these plants and get the license for them are not large necessarily large electric power companies that are very well capitalized companies that have a lot of resources. So as you start to think about situations in which you get to limitations on funds, you no longer have such a large corporate entity behind this process to ensure that you ultimately find the funds to clean it up. The final issue which often gets lost in this process is that these funds which were originally set aside by the rate payers, so the people who bought the electricity, they weren't set aside by the companies themselves. They would charge the rate payers for this money. Originally those funds, if there was any leftover decommissioning, were intended to go back to the people who paid that money, so the rate payers. So we've lost that thread a little bit as these companies have come in and said, well, we'll take all that extra money. So there's a real policy question in there that I think people need to think about as they go forward. So turning to the second issue, it's what to do then. So we talked about the decommissioning really being the actual cleanup of the plant itself. But in addition to that you have this spent fuel which is all the reactor fuel that came out of the reactors that used to power it over the 40, 50, 60 year lifetime of that reactor. And that spent fuel is now hazardous on a very, very different time scale than the reactor itself now, of course, which is in decommissioning at most in 60 years. So you're taking this site and what you're doing is you potentially can clean it up in a few decades, but now you've got issues with what to do with this spent nuclear fuel. The U.S. has failed for a variety of reasons to develop a national essentially repository to store all that fuel. So really we're left with some type of management. And there's basically two approaches to managing that fuel. One is at the reactor sites themselves or at some consolidation of sites that, so if a utility owns multiple reactor sites, there are utilities that do move fuel to one of those plant sites that they own. But primarily there's the approach of leaving it at existing reactor sites or absent some type of permanent repository doing what's called a consolidated interim storage facility, which means we take waste from a number of different places, find a place to put it, and leave it there. And so I just want to touch on those issues a little bit. The basically de facto solution for all the sites right now is to keep it where it is. And for a variety of reasons that is not the worst scenario in many respects. The fuel as long as it's maintained is generally in a relatively safe configuration and there are a number of sites in the country that are already doing this, so we have experience with this process. So certainly in a short period of time this appears to be a viable approach. But one of the issues that we have to look at going forward is if we have these new entrants coming in who don't have a lot of experience operating nuclear reactor sites and they're there largely due to decommissioning, but now they actually have the responsibility for the fuel as well. That's a very different question then about these companies being able to maintain and monitor that fuel for the potentially centuries that it could be monitored and needed to be dealt with. So the other approach which is a very attractive approach, in particular from the industry perspective, is what's called a consolidated interim storage site. And that basically means finding some location somewhere where you can take all this fuel that maybe is in your member's district, moving that somewhere that's in somebody else's district, and that can always be an attractive proposition for the first group. And so the industry likes to talk about this as a very viable approach. We want to do consolidated interim storage. And largely the idea is you can then fully decommission a site and move forward. But if you think about this, there's a lot of challenges behind this idea of consolidated interim storage. So the first one is that essentially this is permanent storage. As much as you may hear from people about consolidated interim storage, it is de facto permanent storage because once you move the fuel somewhere, it's going to be very hard to move it somewhere else. Really the only place in principle you can move it to would be a permanent repository. But right now there's really no prospects, certainly in the next several decades, for any type of permanent repository for spent fuel. So you get into questions about who would own that fuel. If you move it to a consolidated storage site, does it still belong to the original producers or the original owners of the site? Well, if you do, then what happens to that fuel when the consolidated interim storage facility closes? Because right now these facilities can only be licensed for 40 years. They're allowed to get license extensions, but at a certain point that license period would end. And then that facility can no longer maintain that fuel. So one of the challenges going forward is what do you do with that period or that assumption that you don't have a repository? Do you require the owners of the fuel today to reserve an area of land where they can take back that fuel in the future? Those are the kinds of policy issues that people need to begin to ask. Because otherwise you're going to wind up potentially moving fuel to a consolidated interim storage site. And then in 60, 70 years when that site is closing, you have nowhere to put that fuel. And we're right back into a situation in which we have fuel that has no home and no viable location. So it's a very, very important question about what you do in the long term. So typically when you talk about interim storage, when you hear about interim storage, in my mind what you always come back to is the issue of permanent storage. Can you find a permanent storage location? And if we could find a permanent storage location, we would use it. So again, I think you get back to a logical loop where the idea of an interim storage site sounds very attractive on the part of the industry. But from a practical standpoint, it's really not that good of a solution. The other piece to consider is that whenever you're dealing with nuclear fuel and moving it to a new location, you do inherit some risks with the transportation of the fuel. And when you have an interim storage site, you're basically increasing the amount of transportation hazard and risk that you have to do. Because you'd have to move that site or that fuel to an interim site and then from that interim site, either back to the original site or to a permanent repository. And so when you start to talk about those kinds of issues, then people begin to realize that interim is maybe not necessarily a good approach. Because either it's going to have to leave that site in which you have new transportation risk, you have the issue of where does it go back to, or it's de facto a permanent storage site. And so the community that may think it's a great idea to have an interim site, all of a sudden realizes that in principle what they're really getting is a permanent storage facility. So I think it's very, very challenging ultimately to identify and ultimately develop an interim storage facility. So that is the end of my presentation and hopefully it kicked off some good ideas that we'll have a discussion about. Thanks. Thank you, Greg. Next up is retired Navy Admiral Len Herring speaking as a safety expert and safety advocate for decommissioning and waste management in Southern California. Len? Thank you, Mary. Thanks for the opportunity to talk today and I'm here. Retired Admiral Len Herring has heard of proud surface warrior and a former nuclear weapons handling, nuclear weapons safety and nuclear weapons assurity officer. I am not a nuclear engineer. I've spent my years working in a world where safety and risk are always in the forefront of everything that I've done. Working in dangerous environments requires that everyone involved is properly trained, exercised and prepared to both conduct the operation in accordance with properly approved and tested rules and regulations and be prepared to react to conditions when those regulations fail to produce the desired outcome. In other words, respond to a disaster. I've learned to examine risk and inspect what you expect. I've learned that training and adherence to the rules is paramount to both safety and success. I've also learned that when you violate or alter safety conditions, you seriously place your people and yourself at risk. Throughout my career, I found that rules and regulations are written for a purpose in my business primarily because of somebody had lost their lives. But the more I looked into this self-regulated system of oversight, I found that condition that I just mentioned not to be adhered to, almost not at all. Modifying and altering safety conditions that were clearly established to define safety conditions seemed to be wavered or exempted without significant review or testing to ensure the risk factor that originally required the rule to be put in place was in fact compromised by its change. In August of last year, songs had a near miss. Songs is sent in a free nuclear generation facility. Had a near miss when a 54-ton container nearly fell 18 feet into its concrete holding facility. Well, that in itself may scare you and it should. That is not what scared me. What scared me is that we would not have been told about the incident unless a whistleblower had come out in public hearing to tell the world that he couldn't stand by and not hear what had happened in that public hearing. If it were not for him, we would not have been made aware that this situation had occurred. And I am convinced that in this self-regulated process that it would have been kept to a mere minimum at best. Since that time, I focused my attention on learning more. And what I've uncovered is to be honest, astounding. I have come to realize that the handling of the most hazardous material known on the face of the earth was in fact being handled like any other commercial waste product. I have found that basic safety requirements have been waived or contorted in favor of expediency and cost. I have found that regulations that are meant to provide the necessary safeguards for the material are often lessened or waived to provide shortcuts for solution. Many that I've reviewed have been issued without a thorough study or an open discussion amongst experts and engineers. I have witnessed numerous exchanges of credible experts in the field of oceanography, seismic geology, physics, metallurgy, chemistry, nuclear engineering, and many more. Have their concerns be blatantly disregarded or ignored by the regulatory commission and those in the process? I have seen a total disregard for peer review and a concise scientific research when there is a difference of opinion amongst the experts involved. Perceptions of difference are not included as part of the process. The trust and confidence of the community and the experts within it have been eroded by the smug and unprofessional manner in which the safety and scientific concerns of those involved have been addressed. NRC Regulation Title 10, Part 72-R, or should I say WUR, deliberately drafted to ensure this highly dangerous material is handed in the most secure and safe manner possible. However, over the course of the last few decades, regulations have been weakened, allowing for exceptions that are simply and clearly not in the best interest of our safety. Besides the siting issue, and I won't get into that, that Staten-Ophry is actually in a bay referred to by early settlers as Earthquake Bay, 100 yards from the 5 and 100 feet from today's ocean front. Probably the most egregious relaxation in my review is that provided by the thin wall container system and the loading process chosen to house the material for some, if not all, an indeterminable time frame. Of the 10 clear requirements established under Title 10, the thin wall container only provides a surety of one, and the system used to transport and load those containers into their storage has an extremely high likelihood of scratching, denting, or gouging the wall of that container, which from a metallurgical perspective provides for the opportunity for severe corrosion problems, which ultimately result in a potential brisk or a breach of that container. A situation that the NRC themselves have acknowledged but failed to detect on its approval. As a matter of fact, a former engineer revealed that had they known this potential existed, they would have never approved it. What that tells me is they put into place a system for the movement of a 54 ton container that they had not tested, evaluated, or in fact seen. These thin wall containers have no internal monitoring and no capability to be currently offloaded or transported, a specific requirement of Title 10. The only way to determine if there is failure is when the external monitors in the concrete cask detect a radiation problem. The problem here is that those sensors are an environment which are naturally ventilated. How is that possibly safe? Today, regardless of this fact, there are nearly 2,500 of these canisters buried throughout the United States. I've uncovered countless instances where concerns have gone unanswered or worse ignored. Hearings to address local problems are often held outside of the region, and comments by the public are limited to 3 minutes. And the comments or questions are pre-selected by the staff, not by the individuals in presence. These issues are extremely complex, they deserve more than a 3 minute opportunity, and they deserve better review. Latent violations of procedures have been uncovered, yet little to no action has been taken. While findings reveal wrongdoing, the violator is permitted to continue operations without real serious consequences. Recently, the NRC handed down a $116,000 fine that was considered a flagrant violation. Well, it's the first in a long string of gotchas. To those who are watching the fine, I can tell you that $116,000 is nothing more than symbolic. This was levied on a company that made more than $3 billion on ratepayers' monies. About a month ago, there was a hearing held in the Congress questioning the FAA about its oversight of Boeing and potential collusion therein. While this situation may sound less than acceptable, I would contend that the situation at the NRC is twice as bad. I've often referred to as being in court, where a five-time DUI individual is telling the judge that he will never do it again. Trust me, and the judge is stupid enough to believe him. In the world I come from, teams are made up of individuals who first receive specific training and equipment. The procedures there to operate and the safety for a role that they are about to play in the hands of other members of the team. Once they prove themselves proficient, they are considered qualified to then join the team with similarly trained individuals who are then given the opportunity to train and learn as a team. Extensive exercise scenarios are conducted, and each member learns what the other member must do in order to provide a safe environment. Once that level is reached, they undergo an extensive testing and evaluation period to prove that they are certified to conduct operations without fear of placing themselves or others at risk. That's what you might have expected or expect of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in moving a 54-ton container of highly radioactive material. Well, guess again. Well, regulations imply that that should have happened. What I found is it would be far from the truth. I couldn't believe it. As a matter of fact, it was revealed to me that the operator of the lift equipment the day the incident took place was chosen to perform the duties not because of his expertise in the handling equipment, but because his rad count was the lowest of the team. I've even found out that the OSHA inspectors who were on site were not nuclear certified. That they were simply industrial engineers. These people have never trained before, exercised with dummy equipment, or passed any significant training requirement that provides them the safety requirements to handle nuclear material. They were, for all practical purposes, hired off the street. Worse, they had never drilled together or received any training on what to do should there have been an accident. The list goes on, and I only have another minute. There's a bigger concern that is of point, and that is, for nine years in the last part of my career, I was a General Courts Marshal Authority as a regional commander. After close examination into conditions of both oversight provided by the regulatory authority, and the documented repeat offenses found, if asked by my seniors, I would be forced to conclude that I had lost all trust and confidence in their ability to remain in command. I would recommend a complete investigation be conducted. I would recommend a cessation of all operations and a relief for the chain of command, responsive for the disregard and blatant changing of standards and safety conditions and operating procedures. I hate to say this, but it's time for the Congress to address the problem and accept that there is no walking away from a nuclear accident. Failure to address the concerns for a national solution that involves our nuclear waste problem is critical. Today we are creating waste sites that should something happen, it will leave portions of this country uninhabitable for not if hundreds, but tens of thousands of years. And if the worst should happen, that there be an explosion, and I'm not saying there would or could or would, but the risk is always there. Maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands could lose their lives. The Congress needs to retake control and make sure these regulations are adhered to, and that the oversight of Congress to change or approve any modification thereunto is done so only with their approval. The oath of office demands it of them. We the people, especially those I represent in Southern California, have lost faith and confidence when it comes to how songs and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is upholding the standards that we expect to be applied when our safety is considered. Thank you. Thank you, Lynn. Next we hear from Leona Morgan, who is a Dine community organizer and co-founder of the Nuclear Issues Study Group, working with communities impacted by uranium mining, the proposed consolidated interim storage or CIS site in New Mexico. Leona. Thank you, Mary. So I'd like to just begin by introducing myself in my people's language. My people are from New Mexico, from the Four Corners area, and I will be speaking on behalf of New Mexicans and the Navajo people who have dealt for a long time with the issues from uranium mining and the entire nuclear fuel chain. So I just wanted to begin by explaining that this idea to move nuclear waste to the west or to places that will impact native peoples is nothing new. We've dealt with so many issues from the beginning of the Manhattan Project to the testing of the Trinity, the Trinity bomb, the uranium mining that I mentioned, and several other steps in the nuclear fuel chain. As indigenous peoples, we see this as another form of colonialism and a form of racism. Our people have not only dealt with the downwind effects from the fallout of all of the nuclear blasts that have occurred in Nevada, but now we're dealing with transport of the high level radioactive waste from these power plants through our communities. And so I'm changing a little bit of the conversation right now to a community perspective. I want to thank everyone for being here, and I'm very happy to be on this panel with all of these guests. And so for me, my perspective of this issue, it really goes back to the uranium mining on our people's lands. As Danette people, we're really well known. Our communities have been dealing, we're well known for the impacts our communities have been suffering from the uranium mining, which is really not addressed today. And so we've had in the United States over 4,000 abandoned uranium mines. And I'm going to speak about that in a minute. First, I just wanted to back up a little bit and explain what is the nuclear fuel chain. So uranium is the fuel for both power and weapons. And so today we're talking about high level radioactive waste. But we all have, like I mentioned, the weapons testing that has happened, we're still dealing with the fallout from that. And the mining that occurred on our lands was predominantly from making weapons. And so our people, we have been, you know, our lands were used, our mother earth was impacted. Some people refer to the mining and the extraction of different energy resources and uranium as it was used for weapons. We refer to this as the raping of our mother earth. And so today in New Mexico, we're dealing with the legacy of not just the mining, but all of these other facilities. And the waste from the uranium still has not been cleaned up, the waste from the mills. I also wanted to mention this year is the 40th anniversary of the United States largest release of radioactivity and the world's largest uranium tailing spill, which happened in our communities in northwestern New Mexico. We call this the church rock disaster. It occurred on July 16th, 1979. July 16th is also the same day that the test for the first atomic bomb occurred in southern New Mexico on July 16th, 1945. And so this is a significant day in history. And we remember this day because of the issues that were created that our people are still dealing with today. Not only are the uranium mines not cleaned up, but the people that have suffered from the mining, the workers, and the people who live downwind from the Trinity blast, they've never been fully compensated. Their health is impacted. And we're still dealing with proposals by the different companies and the federal government to try to address. And so it's more than an insult. Again, we say this is a form of racism that this type of contamination has occurred on our people. A friend of mine refers to this as a slow genocide because of the lasting impacts not just to our health today, but to our DNA. And so right now there's movements in Congress to change the Radioactive Exposure Compensation Act to include downwinders from the weapons. There's also movements in Congress to deal with some of the uranium mining legacy, such as the 1872 mining law, which was used as a form of legitimizing the theft of our lands. And so that that is being proposed in Congress by Representative Grahavala, as well as protection of sacred places such as the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon has about a million acres of mineral withdrawal, which means there can be no uranium mining there currently. But this does not protect. This is only a temporary protection. And still there are several mines around the Grand Canyon that are grandfathered in to allow continued uranium mining in that area. And so I bring these two things up because there are pushes in Congress to change these things from the past. Like I mentioned, the 1872 mining law is very old law. But today our people, we're still suffering and dealing with the mess that was created, not just by these laws, but by the current administration trying to take away protections that were put in place for uranium mining such as bear's ears. And so I bring up these things because sacred sites to indigenous peoples are very important, and I'm going to go into that in a minute. But I just wanted to emphasize that the nuclear fuel change started with uranium mining. We have processing in New Mexico. We have nuclear labs. We also now are dealing with this thing that is called CIS or consolidated interim storage. And so here's a map of the mines that I mentioned. The EPA counts 15,000 and the DOE takes responsibility for about 4,000. And again, these have not been fully cleaned up. In Church Rock, the company that was responsible for that big spill that I mentioned is United Nuclear Corporation. And currently their proposal for cleanup of their mine is to scrape up the surface, the mine waste, and put it on top of the mill waste. And not address the issue that was created by the spill, which left about 100 million gallons of radioactive waste that flowed from New Mexico westward into Arizona, as well as 1,100 tons of solid radioactive and hazardous materials. And so I mentioned sacred places. This is a map that shows the states of Arizona and New Mexico. And the orange area there is what we call Navajo Indian Country. This is the current legal recognized jurisdiction of the Navajo Nation. Although our traditional homelands exceeded this area, you can see the four mountain peaks there. Those are our four sacred mountains, which our people consider sacred and the entire area within that region is our homelands. Because of the mess that was made from the uranium mining, we passed a law in 2005 to stop further uranium mining on our lands. And some of that contamination that was caused by the transport also pushed us to pass the Transportation Act of 2012, which actually outlaws the transportation of all radioactive materials besides those that are being transported for cleanup and medicinal use. So we actually are against the transport that whole tech is proposing, as well as waste control specialists. And for us, as didn't have people, we have already dealt with all of the impacts. And so we do not welcome anymore, and the Navajo Nation has passed a resolution against this proposed project. And I just wanted to note that the Organization of American States, as well as the United Nations, have both passed declarations on the rights of indigenous peoples that are specifically to protect our peoples against racism, that give us and outline the rights for a healthy environment, and also the right to self-government. And so because these are our laws, these are things that the company whole tech and the United States, by allowing whole tech to move forward, are violating our indigenous sovereignty. This is an image that we use for education about radioactive issues, because as we know, there is a link to cancer, and we have had an increase in cancer and various health impacts to our people, and our children and our environment as well. The proposed area for the whole tech project is in what's known as the Permian Basin, which is heavily inundated by extraction for oil and gas. And in fact, the oil and gas industry has come out against whole tech. And so this is not a good location for a nuclear waste dump. As you can see in the map on the right side, we're already overwhelmed with other nuclear industries, as well as two other waste sites for transuranic waste and waste control specialists, which currently has low level waste, but also wants to expand to take waste from power plants. And I just wanted to note that we have opposition against this project. In 2016, the state of New Mexico actually passed two memorials to support CIS, and when we had done some education to our elected officials, one of them told me that he signed this memorial, but he didn't know what he was signing, because how could they know if the applications were not made public until the next couple of years? And even today, whole tech still has a wealth of information that they need to procure. Whole tech has not done tribal consultation. Whole tech has not done adequate cultural resources, tribal consultation. And so that's one of the issues that I'd like to talk about as well. Our communities in both New Mexico and Texas have passed several resolutions opposing CIS as well as a transport. And most of our congressional representatives are opposed to it. Both of our senators have come out against whole tech and CIS as well as our representative Debra Holland and our representative Ben Ray Lujan. And right now, our new governor is also taking a stance against it, which we think is great because the former governor did not do as well of a job. In fact, she was one of the sources of how this all started, because she was the first person to make a very public claim that New Mexico wants it, when in fact we do not want it. And most of us consider consolidated interim storage and bringing high level nuclear waste to our state, a form of environmental racism. So I just want to conclude my presentation and I'll be happy to answer any questions. One of the bottom lines is that our people do not want it and that we consider, we know CIS is illegal. I want to end by reading a quote from a community person, Rose Gardner, who lives in the area. She is currently dealing with both the impacts from Urenco, the enrichment facility as well as the proposed CIS sites. Rose Gardner from UNIS New Mexico says, I am very disturbed about the decision from the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board and the complicit activities from the NRC and Holtec to completely leave knowledgeable people and the concerned citizens of Lee and Eddie counties in New Mexico as well as the general public along the rail lines of America out of the debate on any of the important issues regarding radiation, transportation and environmental injustice. Future disposition of this lethal and dangerous high level waste that could come to my land of enchantment. Somebody please help us to stop this grave injustice. Thank you. Thank you, Leona. Next is Kevin Camps, radioactive waste specialist with Beyond Nuclear, a non-government organization working with communities impacted by nuclear facilities nationwide and it really should say worldwide. Thank you. Thanks, Mary. And I would like to start with some words from Ian Zabardi of Native Community Action Council in Las Vegas. He asked me to share. He said that going along with the Yucca Mountain Dump is not doing a job. It is banality to genocide. I look forward to demonstrating Shoshone Title at the NRC and making the case of U.S. violation of 18 United States Code 1091 Genocide. So 77 years ago in 1942 the U.S. military and the Manhattan Project created the first high level radioactive waste and then 62 years ago the first civilian reactor fired up, the first commercial high level radioactive waste and we still don't know what to do with the first cup full. And thank you to Jeff Fettis at NRDC for winning the 2004 Yucca Mountain lawsuit in federal court where the EPA was forced under court order to acknowledge a million years of hazard with commercial high level radioactive waste and military. But actually that's a low ball. I-9129 is hazardous for 157 million years. Actually to be safe we'd better worry about 314 million years. So the quote from the Old Testament behind me about having vision or else you will perish, our species has never had to think this far ahead in terms of risk. We've done this to ourselves. So the main message of my talk today is we have stopped many bad dump proposals in the past, many times over. We can and must stop the proposals that are dangerously bad currently. And this is the advance. Is my slideshow ready to go? Okay, great. So I wanted to follow up on something that Greg Yasko said earlier. Reactor shutdowns are very good news. We have seen seven reactors shut down in the United States since 2013. It's a record breaking number. And why is it good news? Because reactor meltdowns can no longer happen once the fuel leaves the core. And in addition no more high level radioactive waste gets generated. That's very good news since we don't have a solution for it. So we have another seven to eight reactors in the next several years that are scheduled for shutdown. And I would like to add that we was robbed at a bunch of reactors. These reactors had announced shutdown dates and they use that as leverage to secure bailouts from the public. Massive bailouts. So Exelon in Chicago has been the beneficiary of $10 billion of public bailouts in the state of New York, in the state of Illinois. They're so greedy they're coming back for a second round in Illinois as we speak. And will they close? Here's some more announced shutdown dates at reactors. All of the bailouts that First Energy is trying to secure in Ohio and Pennsylvania are at some particularly dangerous reactors. So Davis-Bessie, Ohio, for example. I did this paper called Radioactive Russian Roulette on the Great Lakes Shore about all the near misses at Davis-Bessie over the past several decades. So we're facing 20 more years of that in the future. And the second one, what Humpty Dumpty doesn't want you to know, Davis-Bessie happens to have a severely cracked containment. And so if they do have a meltdown, it's so severely cracked that concrete could spall off the exterior of the containment and take out safety systems down below. So in that sense, the containment could cause the meltdown and then not contain the radioactivity. That's Davis-Bessie. They want to keep going. So to sober that sentiment of it's good news, there are communities, host communities, there are workforces, there are charitable organizations in these localities that will suffer due to the loss of revenue. And some groups in the room, NEERS, NEIS of Chicago, Agree in New York have led the effort nationwide to secure just transitions at these shutting down nuclear power plants. And as Greg Yazko made clear, this issue of the need for just transitions to take care of the host communities is going to be an accelerating one across this country. Instead of bailing out the for-profit corporations that have made filthy profits for decades at the expense of the public, perhaps we should worry about the workforces who are on the front lines of the radioactive risk and worry about the communities that have faced these risks for so long. So one of the catchphrases at NRC in an industry is effective and efficient regulation. It's a Orwellian term, given the safety risks. So it's ironic timing. In addition to the July 16th dates of infamy in New Mexico that Leona mentioned, there's another one now from 2018. It's when the NRC began the licensing proceeding for the whole tech Eddie Lee Energy Alliance in New Mexico. And boy, have they been efficient and effective. The NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board last week rejected six independent legal interventions, totaling more than 50 legal objections to this proposal. They just got rid of them all in one fell swoop. Pretty shocking behavior. But all of those interveners, or most of them anyway, have vowed to appeal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself, have vowed to appeal to the federal courts. Whole tech is sticking by its confidence that they will have their license in hand by 2020. So what are beyond nuclear's legal objections? Well, that two major federal laws are violated by this proposal. One is the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which clearly states that the U.S. Department of Energy cannot take ownership, cannot take liability for commercial irradiated nuclear fuel until a licensed and operating repository exists. And this is a very critical law, because it defends a state like New Mexico from becoming what Greg Yasko warned about, de facto permanent surface storage. And what's the problem with de facto permanent surface storage? Well, let's just take it from the Department of Energy itself. In its 2002 Yucca Final Environmental Impact Statement, where it warned that permanent storage abandoned over a long enough period of time with loss of institutional controls, will result in failure of the containers and catastrophic releases of ionizing radioactivity into the environment. That can happen at reactor sites. That can happen at centralized interim storage. And the other law being violated is the Administrative Procedure Act, where it says that the NRC is not above the law. It has to obey the law. It has to obey the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. It can't make it up as it goes. So we will be in the second highest court in the land, soon, the D.C. District Court of Appeals to argue our case. But we are not alone. The oldest and largest environmental group in the country, Sierra Club, is an official intervener with dozens of contentions against this proposal. And there is an environmental coalition, including Nuclear Issues Study Group of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Leona is a co-founder, represented by Terry Lodge and Toledo, Ohio, which has a real focus on the transportation risks. Most states in the lower 48, 100-plus major urban areas, are going to see these trucks, these trains, and these barges coming through on their way to New Mexico in a great big hurry, if Holtec has its way. So Holtec has a lot of problems. I learned in January of 2003 about an epidemic of quality assurance violations. And as the admiral related, that information came from a very courageous whistleblower. Oscar Sharani of Exelon, who was made to pay for revealing this information. He was blacklisted from the industry for the rest of his life. And he regards the Holtec containers as nothing but garbage cans because they so badly violate quality assurance at zero miles per hour, sitting still, let alone going 60 miles per hour down the rails through major urban areas. And then he was backed up by an NRC whistleblower, Dr. Ross Landsman, now retired, who compared NRC, and Holtec's decision making to NASA's that led to space shuttles hitting the ground. These are the kind of risks that whistleblowers are warning us about. Holtec also has a bad habit of engaging in bribery. In fact, there were convictions down in Alabama at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant. But Holtec got a slap on the wrist, 60 days suspension, small fine, and went on its way with that kind of risk. So Holtec, and went on its way with that contract. And Shirani and Landsman both alleged that Holtec CEO, Krishna Singh, attempted to bribe them into silence about the quality assurance violations. There's also a little problem of racism that was mentioned earlier. Krishna Singh said these amazing words to a business magazine, and this is the reporting from W-H-Y and Philly, the NPR station. His own workforce, which he's referring to, in Camden, New Jersey. They don't show up to work. They can't stand getting up in the morning and coming to work every single day. They haven't done it, and they didn't see their parents do it. Of course, some of them get into drugs and things, so it's difficult. So the environmental justice violations, Holtec's problems in Chernobyl, where it's facing huge fines for screw-ups. And there's this mini-series on HBO to check out about the Chernobyl catastrophe. And the theme of it is, what is the cost of lies? And I would add secrecy. So these centralized interim storage facilities in New Mexico and Texas are three times yucca. That's what we're facing. We've stopped them before at Skull Valley Go shoots in Utah, at Mescalero Apache in Southeastern New Mexico at 60 reservations across the country. SNC-Lavalin, Holtec's partner in decommissioning, is headline news in Canada for its corruption, and it may cost Justin Trudeau his prime ministership this October. The other company engaging in decommissioning at Vermont Yankee, North Star has a lot of problems, and I wanted to emphasize Arriva, Orano of France's role. That's their reprocessing facility, dumping radioactivity into the English Channel into the Atlantic Ocean. They want to reprocess in Texas. Holtec wants to reprocess in New Mexico. They want to get their hands on the decommissioning trust funds, not to mention, in addition, the Nuclear Waste Fund, the Judgment Fund, Damage Awards. They want to get their money on billions and billions of public dollars to do a shortcut on cleanup, do as little cleanup as the NRC will let them get away with and then put the rest of the money in their pocket, not give it back to the public who paid for it in the first place in their facilities with the excess. So, we're doomed to repeat mistakes if we don't learn from them. So, I point out Big Rock Point in Michigan, 67 megawatt electric reactor, it costs $367 million to decommission. The thousand megawatt reactors are 15 times bigger. Multiply that decommissioning price tag by 15, and guess what? They left plutonium in the groundwater, in the soil, in the sediments of Lake Michigan. This is just by focusing on some very bad bills that we're facing right now, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019, nearly identical to the Schimpkes bill of last year. This recently introduced Senate bill 1234, the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2019, and also centralized interim storage and YACA funding bills, energy and water appropriations. The house markup is Wednesday. We have to stop these bad bills like we've done for a generation. And here are some good bills that we can support. The Stranded Act, not only sponsored by Senator Duckworth of Illinois, but also Representative Schneider of Illinois. Consent based siting legislation that the Nevada delegation has introduced, and a good bill that needs to happen. Allison McFarland, NRC chairman voted in favor of this, the sold dissenting vote for expedited transfer out of pools because pools are mega and where does that expedited transfer have to go? It has to go into hardened onsite storage or as close to the point of origin as possible. And I'll just close with this because there's so much clamor, rightfully so, about the San Onofre situation, a humble proposal that instead of transferring the waste a thousand miles to the New Mexico and Texas borderlands, how about a few miles deeper into the heart of Camp Pendleton where thousands of U.S. Marines to help guard it. And I'm not just putting that on San Onofre. I'm from Palisades, Michigan where we've had the same problems that San Onofre now faces only we've been facing them for 25 years. We need to move the waste off the Lake Michigan Beach away from the drinking water supply for 40 million people in two countries and a large number of Native American communities. And we would be in a better place. It's an interim measure. The dilemma is high-level radioactive waste. It shouldn't be on this planet, but it is. And we have to figure out how to isolate it from the living environment for evermore into the future. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. Our next speaker is Dr. Bumnet Alamehu. I'm very happy to be here. Let me find my... So my talk today will focus on radiation protection context of nuclear decommissioning. And to start us off, nuclear decommissioning is an integral component of the nuclear fuel cycle. And it has the following major components. So it involves the safe removal of a facility from service and reduction of residual radioactivity to the combination of the NRC license. And the other is removing the spent fuel, dismantling any systems or components, containing activation products and cleaning up or dismantling reductively contaminated materials from facility. So to accomplish these tasks, radiological source characterization and environmental radiation monitoring are key and essential aspect. So my talk today will focus on these two components. So what do I mean by radiological source characterization? So it is a determination of the nature, location and concentration of radonuclides at a nuclear installation. And it has several components, but just to mention few, it's to identify the extent and nature of contamination to determine the waste classification. So what will be the final nuclear waste so that it will be ready for packaging, shipping and disposal. To determine what should be the radiation protection for the workers and the public in general. And ultimately its goal is to support the estimation of decommissioning costs. So the major determinant of cost in nuclear decommissioning costs is that of the radiation that is left at the site. And the other key component is environmental radiation, environmental radiation monitoring. And contaminated areas during nuclear operation requires remediation after the end of operation with the ultimate goal of reaching the Greenfield status. And radiation monitoring should be a key component in the contamination and cleaning of equipments. So reactors undergoing decommissioning process should be required to provide the public with real time online radiation data. So this is very, very important. And radiation monitoring stations at the site and in the emergency planning zone can be established on a community by community basis. So what are the key questions that should be addressed when it comes to environmental radiation monitoring? So these are some of the questions I listed. So first is how many monitoring stations should be established and where they should be located. And second, who should do the monitoring and how should they be selected? The other question is how should the radiation data be presented and disseminated to the public? So the question is how much of education and training should be provided to the communities who will be hosting this monitoring stations? So if we make this environmental radiation monitoring data available to the public, it will help to create transparency and it will help the communities to understand about the radiation that will be there for a lot of time, a lot of time. So I would like to finalize my talk by speaking up a little bit on emergency preparedness. So to coincide with the reduction of radiological source term at the site, there is a graded standard or approach that should be followed. So these graded standards are defined as follows. So the first stage in emergency preparedness is the period immediately after the session of power operations or right after the power plant has stopped operation. And the second stage is the period when any spent fuel is still in a weight pool storage. And the third is the period when all spent fuel is in dry cask storage. So these are the graded standards for emergency preparedness. In the first two states, emergency planning and physical security requirements should not change. We should have the same emergency preparedness until the final tier is achieved because in the first two states, the radiological source term will not change much and the source term will still be the same, more or less. But in the final tier, the additional data should be on the residual source term that will be, that will remain there. So in the decommissioning planning process just to conclude, environmental radiation monitoring and proper radonuclide source characterization is a key component that should be addressed in the beginning or in the planning stage of the nuclear decommissioning process and that process would know what sources are there and how they should protect themselves. Thank you so much. Thank you, Bonant. Dr. Marvin Reznikoff is senior associate at radioactive waste management associates and has for decades consulted internationally on radioactive waste management. Marvin? Let me figure out how to work this. Oh, here I am. I'll start on a personal note. I started working on transportation of nuclear materials in 1975 when I worked for the state of New York. I was in the state of New York, we had a plant called West Valley reprocessing plant. They separated out plutonium and where did that plutonium go? Liquid plutonium was being shipped out of containers that could withstand a 30 foot drop. Most people know that planes for the most fly higher than 30 feet except the NRC. And we fought them and we weren't successful but finally Congressman Scheuer in 1981 in an appropriations bill for the NRC said the containers should be able to withstand an air crash just like what do I call it black box that they have on airplanes. And they did. The NRC passed regulations and they redesigned these containers. Good. And I see the same problem happening now with nuclear transport for irradiated fuel. These regulations for shipping casts were established in the 1960s and the situation the transportation situation has greatly changed since that time. At that time they were shipping well in the 70s and the fuel rod at a time and the situation now is they ship 37 they can ship 37 fuel assemblies in a shipping cask and the fuel can be not low burn up but can be high burn up 72,000 megawatt days per metric ton and the situation on rail lines has greatly changed now there are many tank cars that are moving because of the oil that was found in North Dakota there have been many more fires that have occurred as I'll show you on a slide and the NRC has to really look at transportation accidents in a real life situation not hypothetical accident conditions like a 30 foot drop or not half hour fire at a house fire temperature 1475 degrees Fahrenheit let me first say what is a nuclear fuel assembly if you haven't seen one before this is it it has each of those rods have fuel pellets that are stacked like poker chips inside these rods and the outside of the rods are called cladding and that's what it looks like and the fuel is generally put in a fuel pool and that's a picture of that I'm going to run through a bunch of these now it's hard to imagine how much radioactivity is in a fuel assembly or in a cask I could tell you the number of curies involved and that doesn't really make much sense so I've put the number in terms of how many Hiroshima bombs worth of cesium-137 cesium-137 is a semi-volatile material that volatilizes under temperatures in a in a cask I'm not saying the casks are going to blow up like a bomb but let me just show you when you have high burn-up fuel and you put 37 of these high burn-up fuel assemblies in a cask the number of Hiroshima bombs worth of cesium-137 is about a thousand a thousand bombs worth in one cask so I just emphasize this because we are not shipping peanut butter let me go through these because I don't have time and these casks are put into concrete silos and they are cooled like a chimney cool air comes in the bottom hot air comes at the top there are other methods when they put them below ground sometimes they have hot air coming out the top but also cool air coming in another vent at the top this is what's happened at Connecticut Yankee the reactor has been taken apart and this is what remains all the fuel on the left all the casks on the left or the fuel itself the three casks on the right are some of the hot components of the reactor San Onofre has more than just fuel sitting now below ground they also have fuel sitting in these horizontal silos this is San Onofre the fuel would sit below ground in the foreground there and then there are those new home containers I want to say that the environment within dry storage is not benign if you look at the cladding temperature in a reactor 340 to 370 degrees centigrade and you look at the cladding temperature in dry storage 360 degrees centigrade it's comparable it's not a benign environment maybe you've seen some of these maps before and it was already alluded to this fuel will go through many states I think two-thirds of the congressional districts if if the waste repository opens or if these dry storage facilities open there will be one cask per day at least moving on the highway or rail for 50 years there will be at least one moving each day I want to point out that these casks have not been physically tested they've been tested by computer simulation under NRC hypothetical accident conditions this half hour fire at 1475 degrees Fahrenheit and 30 mile per hour impact all that is by computer simulation I should point out that there are some locations where it's preferred to move fuel by rail but some locations is not so possible for instance at Indian Point there's no rail line there so fuel would have to be taken to a rail point a transfer location and that is not so easy with heavy haul transport as you see some of these heavy haul transport can be 220 feet in length and that doesn't go around turns very easily so it's likely the fuel from Indian Point would be barged probably down to New Jersey the regulatory drop test is like this a 30 foot drop test there are other kinds of there are other concerns if casts hit sideways then you don't have the impact limiters to alleviate the fall I'm most concerned about the seals that are damaged in a fire because fire can be much hotter than a house fire 1475 it can be 1800 degrees Fahrenheit I've looked into now the Federal Railway Administration has a lot of data concerning fires on railroads the NRC has looked up to the year 2008 and you see a declining line in fires per freight train per mile but if you look at more recent data you'll see that from 2010 to 2018 actually the accident rate is increasing and that's mainly because of these tanker cars that are moving from North Dakota and as an example of what could happen this is a town called Lac Magante in Quebec and this is before the accident which had 50 tanker cars missed the turn and led to a tremendous conflagration and destroyed half the town and the fire lasted for over 24 hours before they could get close enough to put it out and over 40 people died this is a fire that occurred in MacArthur Maze it's called but in Oakland this is a highway fire chemicals can burn at much higher temperatures than house fires diesel fuel fires the flame temperature is shown here 1740 to 1839 degrees Fahrenheit and we're mainly concerned about ceasium which is in the fuel and that it convolta lies and be released in a serious accident more recently fuel which is high burn up has been unloaded the fuel is not 40,000 gigawatt 40 gigawatt days per metric ton it's now over 72 gigawatt days per metric ton so there's a much higher build up efficient products like ceasium and the more recent um requests by the industry are to actually have fuel which is two years decayed before it's moved into dry storage and you can see by this diagram that that's when the fuel is much more radioactive so fuel has to sit and cast sit in fuel pools much longer before it can be shipped if it's just high burn up fuel 40 years before the concern about high burn up fuel in that I'm sort of going to end there is the cladding can be more brittle can be thinner the concern is vibrations on the rail can cause major degradation of the cladding itself and that's it thank you thank you Marvin 100 years ago we did not have any nuclear power reactors or any of this waste in 1942 human beings split atoms for the first time all of this is new stuff we're on a learning curve today we've opened the discussion with history technical insights policy perspectives legal perspectives and just anger just anger about violation of trust violation of people violation of our earth I want to add just one point and then we'll open it to questions it was mentioned that a markup is coming in appropriations you've heard very good logical and personal and technical arguments that consolidated interim storage deserves zero funding and I just want to add that the Yucca mountain site when the licensing process was terminated was facing a challenge to the license with over 200 technical contentions from the state of Nevada which is completely committed to fighting Yucca mountain for as long as it is a state I often tell them they should secede but that's with a tongue-in-cheek and also the western bands of the Shoshone Nation for the same reasons that the Denae people are fighting CIS oppose Yucca mountain not because it's a repository but because the site itself should have been disqualified under the siting conditions in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act hence the number of technical contentions so we again urge with the markup that Yucca mountain is not a worthy path towards a permanent solution so with that I'm going to forego my own slides and open to questions okay over here thank you so much for your really informative and heartfelt although you were very calm presentations I did a lot of research on this for my master's thesis a number of years ago and the issues are the same even though it was actually decades ago I now have as an environmentalist I now have friends and colleagues saying well with climate change and so forth we need to re-look at nuclear power and we have this whole new brand of wonderful new compact modular reactors and my gut reaction is that that's a terrible idea but maybe I'm wrong how do you how do you see this new generation or generations of nuclear power Kevin do you want to start with that well I'd just like to give a shout out to the Sunrise Movement with the Green New Deal which has made a clear statement that nuclear power has no place in a Green New Deal so we would share that sentiment a lot of these proposed new reactor designs are decades old actually they're dusting them off taking them off the shelf some of them are especially dangerous so for example on October 5th of 1966 we almost lost Detroit the Fermi Unit 1 reactor had a partial meltdown and there's an excellent book about that there's an excellent song about that while these sodium cooled or liquid metal cooled reactors are among these so called advanced new reactor designs so we think it's a lot of pie in the sky that's very dangerous and it's going to eat up all the money and there will be no money left for the real solutions Arjun Makajani of IEER wrote a book in 2007 called Carbon Free and Nuclear Free Renewables and Efficiency can solve the problem it was a technical study in 2007 and since that time countries have moved to do it Germany and we're not sure of that so by 2022 the reactors will be off in Germany completely most of them already are a response to Chernobyl and Fukushima and by mid-century greenhouse gas emissions in Germany will be drastically reduced at around the 85% level over previous levels Admiral I just want to add one point to that which is nuclear reactors are not carbon free most of the carbon takes place in the uranium mining section where they have to dig up well I did calculations on the order over 100,000 it depends on the enrichment the level of uranium 235 in the uranium ore itself but for the states the amount of uranium that has ore that has to be mined is over 100,000 just to operate a reactor for one year and those trucks diesel trucks have to be carrying all that material then to a uranium mill and the enrichment step itself also uses electricity to actually enrich the fuel so it's not a carbon free operation so just real quick too I've always been a nuclear proponent always have been until I got involved in this and what I really am looking at is a cessation of all activities to include anything that is current in the technology advancements that we see in the nuclear field until we figure out what to do with the waste on top of that I am a senior military advisor to the center for climate and security we just recently released a white paper that we had specifically directed towards the White House Department of State and Department of Defense on the proliferation of nuclear materials as a result of climate change in IPCC and the vast issues associated with global destabilization and climate change where potentially those countries greatest at risk for geopolitical instability are also those countries who have declared their opportunity to enter into the nuclear world through the IPCC so it's a real issue that we must address from a national security perspective because the technology is being deployed in those particular regions some of them are places like Kenya Indonesia Chad you know they've had three, four coups in just under a decade do we want them to have the Chinese the Pakistani the Indian and the Russian nuclear technology applying what they consider to be carbon free energy for the future we think not anyone else want to address this okay next question in front oh I'm sorry just addressed Kevin Camps it seems that over these past few years and in the near future there's a paradigm shift by the nuclear companies that operate nuclear power plants and own nuclear power plants to sell these nuclear power plants to decommissioning companies which may or may not be transporting the waste and I'd like you to try to comment on to the best of your knowledge the relative risks of having a nuclear power plant have robust storage with hard and on-site storage principles applied versus transporting it across the country to a consolidated interim storage facility well thank you so in 2002 Citizens Awareness Network of the Northeast convened a conference in Connecticut and that's where Dr. Makajani coined the phrase hard and on-site storage and it was followed up by a report by Dr. Gordon Thompson that Citizens Awareness Network commissioned called robust storage January 2003 so the pools are mega catastrophes as I mentioned they need to have expedited transfer out into a dry cask storage configuration but the design and the manufacturer of the dry casks has to be significantly improved over what we have and in fact whole other categories of risk need to be addressed with dry cask storage and that's what we mean by hardening that's what we mean by robust terrorist attacks for example right now the dry casks are lined up like bowling pins wide open to attack from various attack scenarios so something as simple as an earthen berm something as cheap as an earthen berm a wall of dirt would preclude certain attack scenarios like remote fired anti-tank missiles that could blow big holes in the sides of these things or as Dr. Resnikoff has pointed out blow a perforation hole through both sides now you're talking disastrous levels of radioactivity release out of perforated cask it'd be bad enough with one side breached there was a study done at US Army Aberdeen Proving Ground in June 1998 where a thick walled cask a cask store was attacked with an anti-tank missile and its wall was penetrated and so there's a radioactive release especially if a fire ensues so the risks are real they need to be addressed they're not being addressed the pools are packed to the gills we almost had a pool fire at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 and the prime minister of Japan serving at the time Naoto Kan has testified that he had a secret contingency plan in the works to evacuate 50 million people 50,50 million people from northeastern Japan if that single pool had gone up in flames we've had studies in this country Princeton researchers like Frank von Hippel who looked at the peach bottom nuclear power plant on the border of Pennsylvania and Maryland if that were to go up in flames under July prevailing weather conditions we're talking $2 trillion plus dollars of property damage and millions of Americans forced to relocate to evacuate so those are the on-site risks that have to be addressed now imagine those risks traveling through the south and west sides of Chicago by the thousands perhaps even by the tens of thousands as was mentioned by another speaker Dr. Resnickoff imagine those risks coming down the Hudson River past Manhattan on a barge so the National Academy of Sciences I'll close with this in 2006 put out a report called Going the Distance about high-level radioactive waste they identified 13 categories of risk that needed to be addressed and I think it's fair to say that 13 years later most to all have not been addressed not adequately not at all and one of the most alarming of those categories was security and so here's Holtec saying we're going to get our license in 2020 we're going to build this thing fast and we're going to start shipping in unprecedented numbers they will match the numbers of shipments that have taken place in this country since 1949 in the first second year of this campaign so unprecedented risks and we we shouldn't be taking these risks anytime soon moving to this question part of it pertains to what you just just on part of it pertains to what you just answered what you just answered but I'm a little more curious as a reporter I've written a lot about dry cast storage as being much bigger improvement over the pools and something that should be safer you talked about thin walls and is there can you explain is there a different status of drywall casks that are more protective than others and I have a second question but I'm trying to get that square on my head so I don't keep repeating drycast storage storage as being a solution to these problems sure and we can easily provide you the data to show the difference between a thin wall container and a solid heavy wall container the thin wall that Holtec is currently utilizing is a half to five-eighths inch thick a thick wall container is roughly 10.9 to 18.4 inches thick the difference in those containers is significant a thin wall container is welded shut a thick wall container is bolted shut it has gaskets you're able to offload onload monitor those the internals that are required per the Title X the thin wall has no capacity to do any of those requirements thin wall is not approved for shipment therefore we have to figure out what to do with that thin wall container before shipment can occur it is subjected to a number of things to include corrosion as you heard that the thick wall containers we have a completely different capacity to be able to both monitor maintain and create both considered dry cast is it legal in terms of decommissioning fund I always thought of that as rate pay as well not something that goes to the utility or goes to the power plant owner that they can decide to disperse as they want is anyone trying to challenge that legally in terms of using that funds is it a pay off for a quick cleanup no go ahead great well mostly what I so generally this is an issue for plants that have entered into deregulated electricity market so is the process of going through that deregulation process they negotiated transfers of the fund from a rate payer base fund to a utility owned fund and some states do have tie backs that still require those funds to be reverted back to this issue and so typically what's happened is part of these transfers the states will negotiate with the owner for a portion of the fund upon completion so in that sense it's happening through a legal process and I'm not aware of anyone challenging that could I just add quickly that as an example Vermont Yankee the NRC recognized price tag for decommissioning $668 million obviously bad underestimates the trust fund only contains $498 million a very significant shortfall and what has NRC been doing for years now approving exemptions from the decommissioning trust fund so that Entergy and perhaps very soon Northstar can make withdrawals from this inadequate trust fund to pay for things like dry cask storage on site to pay their local tax revenues as part of decommissioning so that's why I mentioned the fear that the cleanups are going to be way too shallow and they had significant radioactive releases at the Vermont Yankee site it's a part of what led to the shutdown despite the NRC rubber stamp of 20 more years and this is going on at all the sites Zion in Illinois the biggest nuclear power plant decommissioning in U.S. history to full-scale $100 million decommissioning trust fund with that I'd like to turn to Ms. Morgan to add anything and then we'll close thank you Mary so I just wanted to add a comment about the issue with climate change internationally there is a push for more nuclear power plants to be built and a similar process is happening that happened to indigenous peoples in the United States that companies state-owned companies from Russia and other places are trying to colonize other lands and use indigenous peoples resources and water to build new nuclear power plants and so we say that nuclear is not a solution to climate change and that it is just ridiculous that we haven't learned from the past I just wanted to conclude by saying that I mentioned a lot of the risks and the costs that we're dealing with from the cleanup of uranium mining and the history of the uranium nuclear legacy in the southwest but when people say they want to move nuclear waste out of their communities they want to get it away they want to take it out and move it somewhere else or you know to keep their communities safe well when you're moving waste away from your communities that away is my community it's our home and it's not just New Mexico who's bearing the risk we are we're very last in the state as a state in many quality of life measurements and so our state as one of the most rural and poorest states is looked at as a nuclear wasteland however just because we're rural doesn't mean there's no people there we are lacking several things that are more accessible in urban areas such as hazmat and first responders and adequate maintenance of railroads and these types of things and so I just want to say as our communities are put at risk it's really every community that's between a nuclear power plant and these sites so it's not just for us that we are concerned we're concerned for everyone and as indigenous peoples most of our prayers and the things that we do our cultural and sexual ways are not just for us or our tribes we pray and we acknowledge everything and everyone in the universe and our future generations so thank you Mary thank you all we appreciate your time and attention