 It's today to discuss issues associated with the licensing of new uranium recovery facilities. The recovery of uranium is used in the supply of fuel for our nation's nuclear industry. It's also a very important environmental issue to those that may be affected by the increasing number of in-situ recovery and other mining activities that are already underway or being planned. The NRC coordinates with many federal, state and tribal partners in our regulation of recovery operations. We also interact with citizens groups on this issue. The commission is interested in today in hearing their perspectives on uranium recovery and the NRC's role in assuring their health safety and protecting the environment. First this afternoon we're going to hear from a panel of external folks representing a variety of topics and viewpoints on uranium recovery. Let me ask that each panelist keep their remarks to 10 minutes. We have a great deal to talk about today and please be respectful of the time and please pay attention to the timing lights. When they go red you are out of time. We also have a number of ongoing adjudications related to specific in-situ leech sites. The commission and the panelists have all been provided a list of those issues in litigation and we've requested the panelists not to discuss any of those issues as they relate to a specific site. I also ask you to consider avoiding the use of acronyms so the public can better understand what we're discussing and need to. During a short break we're going to hear from a panel of NRC staff on recent licensing actions, environmental review efforts and associated interactions with the affected public. Before we begin now we are going to hear from the NRC staff and I will turn it over to Mike Weber who is the acting executive director for operations. Thank you chairman. Good afternoon. Good afternoon commissioners. To appear before the commission today and make a presentation on the staff's uranium recovery program, uranium recovery is a small but important part of the agency's program. About 1% of the agency's resources are devoted to the uranium recovery program where we focus on ensuring protection of people and the environment. It's also important because as the chairman pointed out in your opening remarks uranium not only fuels the nuclear power plants and the research and test reactors but is also used in fabricating the targets that are used to prepare medical isotopes and for other applications. In the last several years uranium recovery has seen renewed interest in the United States. This is driven by not only the increase in the price of uranium but also in the exploration this year of the megawatts to megatons to megawatts program and thus we expect that some of the imports that have been occurring over the last several years will no longer occur and thus it drives more of a domestic interest in the uranium supply. To provide our presentation today I'm going to turn it over to Mark Satorius. Mark's the director of the Office of Federal and State Materials and Environmental Management programs and his staff to lead us through. Mark? Thanks Mike and good afternoon chairman, commissioners. The next slide please. Today we discuss the uranium recovery program with a focus on the licensing of new recovery facilities and covered the substantial progress that we've made since we last briefed the commission on this program in March 2010 and also to go over a few of our challenges. With me today are Drew Prasinko the deputy director of the Division of Waste Management and Environmental Protection, Bill Wontill who is the branch chief of the, it's the branch chief of the uranium recovery licensing branch and Kevin Shea who is the branch chief of the environmental review branch and they will be covering topics as we go through our presentation. Before we get started a couple of key messages that I'd like to share with you is that the uranium recovery program consists of new licensing, managing existing facilities, inspections, guidance development and outreach. Planning and budgeting are based as you've heard on the previous panel on letters of intent from applicants that provide applications submittal dates. We have undertaken a number of program efficiencies which include the development of a generic environmental impact statement and conducting pre-submission application reviews. And lastly the focus is gradually shifting more to oversight and inspection as new sites are licensed and put into operation which results in less resources available for new licensing. Could I have the next slide please? As you can see from the slide the price of uranium was stable for quite some time bouncing between $10 and $20 per pound in the 2006 to 2007 prices soared as Commissioner Sineke mentioned earlier. For many reasons one being such as the indication of a nuclear renaissance for both new build here and abroad. Since the peak in approximately 2007 the prices fluctuated between $40 and $80 per pound. We are now seeing a large growth in applications over the next several years based on the letters of intent that we've received and as has been mentioned before we have faced and continue to face a challenge in planning and budget execution due to the inaccuracies of some of these letters of intent. These letters of intent have traditionally turned out to have an inaccuracy of about 40 percent so if we get 12 letters of intent to come in in 2014 we may actually get three or five in 2014 with the others being coming at later dates when funding may be available or other implications may have been satisfied.