ML20214A939

NRC Staff Comments on Proposed Order Re Electronic Storage & Retrieval.* ASLB Proposed Order Should Not Be Adopted.If ASLB Agrees,Staff & Parties Could Supply ASLB w/MS-DOS Disks of Prefiled Testimony.Certificate of Svc Encl

ML20214A939
Person / Time
Site:	Diablo Canyon
Issue date:	05/13/1987
From:	Chandler L NRC OFFICE OF THE GENERAL COUNSEL (OGC)
To:	Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel
References
CON-#287-3475 OLA, NUDOCS 8705200014
Download: ML20214A939 (12)

Text

kM May 13,1987

• DOLKEiff

';% RC UNITED STATES OF AMERICA NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

. '87 MAY 15 A10:04 BEFORE TIIE ATOMIC SAFETY AND LICENSING BOARD In the Matter of )

)

[0b$EPANC" s Iir3 PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC COMPANY ) Docket Nos. 50-275 OLA COMPANY -) 50-323 OLA

)

(Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant ) (Spent Fuel Pool)

Units 1 and 2) )

NRC STAFF COMMENTS ON PROPOSED ORDER REGARDING ELECTROMIC STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL In its Memorandum and Order (Proposed Order Requiring the Filing of Dceuments on Diskettes Suitable for Electronic Storage and Retrieval), dated April 30,1987 (Proposed Order), the Licensing Board directed the parties to file comments regarding the process and procedures developed by the Board.

The NRC Staff's comments follow, b 1/ In addition, this pleading will be made available as the Staff's test disk, also reouested by the Board. Proposed Order at 5. By leave of the Board, the disk is being provided on, May 13, 1987.

For the Board's information, this pleading was prepared by Staff Counsel on an IBM PC XT with 256 I;b of memory, equipped with two -

51 inch floppy-disk drives , using the DisplayWrite 3 program, version 1.10; margin settings were 8 and 74. At this time, Staff Counsel uses PC-DOS 2.10 and an AT&T Autocall 2224B modem. The document was transmitted to the Office's IBM _5520 Administrative System using the IBM 5520 Personal Computer 'Attachrrient Program.

It was then put into the 5520 format which uses 11 pitch proportional spacing, with margins of 14 and 87, and is justified on both the left and right margins. After final revision, the pleading was downloaded from the 5520 System onto a disk and converted into ASCII form, althou gh , for reasons subsequently discussed, using the format established by the Office of the ,Geniral.' Counsel's 5520 System rather than that suggested by the Board in its' Proposed Order.

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8705200014 870513 PDR ADOCK 05000275 O PDR $67 t

I.

GENERAL COMMENT

S s The Lice'nsing Board ahtly provides that provisions of its Proposed Order "are not intended to replace the standard filing requirements in Nuclear Regulatory Commission proceed'ings." Proposed Order at 2.

Nonetheless, the Licensing Board contemplates that in this proceeding,

"[t]he parties will file hard copy as usual in conformance with 10 C.F.R. 2.708 (1987) adjusted for any limited modifications that may be necessary for formatting on a diskette." Id. , emphasis added. The modifications that may be nccessary to comply with the formatting later specified by the Board might cause documents filed to be in noncompliance with the format explicitly required by the Commission's Rules of Practice which are not subject to waiver or citeration by an individual Licensing Board. To this extent, then, the Staff respectfully suggests that the Board should modify its Order.

The Board's Proposed Order is premised on four benefits that would ostensibly inure to it and the parties. Proposed Order at 3. While the Staff recognizes the possible benefit to the Board, any benefit to the Staff appears marginal at best. With respect to the first potential benefit, the availability of a full text, electronically searchable . record, . it. is likely. that the total record in this proceeding will be relatively small given the parties' ,

anticipation that the hearing can be completed in approximately two to three days. See, Memorandum and Order (Hearing Schedule), April 9,1987 at 3.

Consequently, the potential benefit,of an electronically searchable record is diminished.

Second, the Board suggests that creation of an electronically searchable record will cssist the parties at the 'heapin in terrhs 'of presenting evidence

and in cross-examination. Proposed Order at 3. Inasmuch as the Staff M does not have equipment comparable to the Board's.,f'.e. a portable Compaq computer, which could be brought to the hearing, this benefit cannot be realized by all the parties who' lacking such equipment, would have to ,

content themselves with the shared use of the Board's equipment s,ubje.ct to its availability. See, Proposed Order at 7.

Third , the Board observes that an electronically searchable record would aid in the preparation of findings of fact and conclusions of law. Id.

at 3. This appears to be largely the same matter identified by the Board as the first potential benefit, discussed above. This is a potential benefit but one which would be of marginal value given the relatively small record that is projected to be created in this proceeding.

Finally, the Board states that the availability of the eidetic memory of the system would enhance the reliability and completeness of the filings of the parties and the Board's issuances. Id. Because of the limitations inherent in use of documents converted into pure ASCII, namely, that they

- do not retain their original format or structure, and the fact that certain material, e.g., drawings, will not be captured by the system, the system envisioned by the Board will not be truly eidetic ,irr . terms of the total record. Bloreover, in light of the small record that is reasonably. to be expected in this proceeding, discussed earlier, any benefit is likely to be small.

d 2/ Although we understand that the, Applicant raay have comparable and compatible equipment, it is not known' whether the Sierra Club does.

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, II. COMMENTS ON FORMAT We turn now to the format specified by the Board. Proposed Order at 5. The Staff has no objection to maldng its filing available in pure ASCII form as requesteo so long as the Board recognizes that conversion to that form effectively strips a document of its overall format, (for , example, double-spacing) as well as any enhancements formatted into tlie original.

Such enhancements might include, for example, use of underscoring and boldface typestyles, whic" are intended by an author to impart emphasis.

Thus, while ASCII form might well be suitable for retrieval, i.e., to facilitate identification of a document, in order to fairly review and utilize a document as it was intended by its author, it is essential that the Board rely only on the har.d copy of any given document ' for purposes of its decisionmaking. U This is especially significant since it would be this form of the record that will be reviewed should any aspect of this proceeding be 4

appealed to either the Atomic Safety and Licensing Appeal Board and/or the Commission which probably would not use the electronic form of the record.

With respect to each of the ASCII format items described by the Board, the Staff offers the following comments: ,

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PAGE SIZE No comment -

't ' ' - -

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PAGE LENGTH The standard number of potential lines - -

on en Si x 11 sheet of paper is 66 for most typewriters and most MS-DOS

, software. Conversion to ASCII text, however, normally eliminates,.any codes set to establish page length unless carriage- returns or line feeds are 3/ Presumably, the Board intends to do this, recognizing as it does, that certain material such as drawings ?are "not to be captured in

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computer readable form." Propo, sed Ord'er at' 6.

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l-s arbitrarily and manually inserted in the text. To do the latter, however, frequently defeats many automatic

., pagination and line adjustment features of word processing software. The Staff would not wish to lose these features nor would it like to spend the extra clerical , time it would take to duplicate the document and manually insert carriage returns before '

converting to ASCII in order to meet the 66 lines per page requirement.

PAGE NUMBERS The Staff objects to the requirement that the page number be embedded in the text at line 63 (centered). The Staff's IBM 5520 Administrative System is currently formatted to provide page numbers centered at the top of each page, printed on line 5, starting with page 2. The Board's proposed format would require defeating this feature and the manual insertion of page numbers on each page at the appropriate line number. This would require additional revision of the document on the 5520 System to assure proper centering of the page number and creation of a new ASCII document each time the text on a page is revised since the ASCII form of a document cannot be revised using the software employed by the Office of the General Counsel. (See also comments on page length. )

PITCH The Staff objects to usint.s, pitch set .

at either 10 (PC) or' 12 ~(5520) inasmuch as the Staff's IBM 5520 , ,

Adminstrative System is set with a pitch of 11 to accommodate proportional spacing. Since conversion to ASCII is accomplished on a line for line basis, however, the pitch setting only establishes how many characters per line will be allowed. Since 11 pitch is roughly 11 characters per inch which falls between that of 10 and 12 pitch, there should be no problem using the Staff's ASCII-coded . text in the Board's applications. ,' ' Of ,cour'se 2 the Staff's h,' .

. . - = ._ . - .- . . .--

'O proportional spacing will be lost in the conversion so an exact document cannot be duplicated by' the Board

- - from its electronic versloh.

FOOTNOTES The Staff would prefer adhering to its practice of placing footnotes on the page of the text ccrresponding to the footnote rather than at the end of the document. While relocating . footnotes '

to the end is technically feasible 'they are automatically placed at the bottom of a page by the IBM 5520 software in use by the Office of the General '

Counsel and this requires less resource effort since they can be produced simultaneously. In addition, we believe that placing notes on the page adds to their value in terms of written expression and advocacy.

SPACING No objection provided that the Board intends to permit a mix of spacing to permit, for example, single-spaced quotations and footnotes to be placed in otherwise double-spaced documents.

TAB SETTINGS With respect to this parameter as well as others, it should be recognized that the function will work uniformly only if the software in use by each party converts to ASCII using the same ASCII code for features for which there is an ASCII code equivalent.

MARGINS The Staff objects t6 setting margins at 2 and 80 (PC) and *17J. arid-l90 (5520). .

The Staff's IBM 5520 Adminstrative System currently is formatted with . .

margin settings of 14 and 87 to comply with the margin requirements of 10 C.F.R. I 2.708.

• ' 4 ENTIRE PARAGRAPH INDENTATION As noted above, conversion to ASCII substitutes spacea for tabs. This makes indentations subject to strange adjustments if subsequently processed by other software programs. The required tab,.ftinction has, no effect on the cony'ersion* process so that spaces r,l ,

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will still be substituted for indentation. Consequently, there is no need for this requirement.

The Proposed Order i' mposes a burden on the parties with at most marginal benefit to them, as discussed above. Each of these provisions would entall establishing a format unique to this proceeding and would add additional tasks to personnel operating the word processing system currently in use in the Office of the General Counsel. Because of their uniqueness, ,

these provisions would require duplication of effort and extensive manual manipulation of documents by word processing personnel in order to convert a document to ASCII form with the format parameters specified by the Board; the net effect would be to defeat the purposes of and eliminate the advantages inherent in the use of a word processing system.

While the burden resulting from the Board's proposal outweighs the benefits to be derived by the parties in this proceeding, the Staff is willing to accommodate the Board's legitimate interest in efficiency and expedition.

Thus, to the extent that it would be of benefit to the Board in facilitating its use of the record, the Staff would be willing to provide to the Board, 51 inch floppy-disks of its prefiled testimony and draft proposed findings of fact within five days of the filing of the hard 'c6hy of ~each.D This material will be in the DisplayWrite format or, if the Board requests, in ASCII form.' .

The Staff would inform the Board of the specine system parameters used for each document provided to enable the Board's administrgtive. staff to convert each document as it wishes. Disks. would then be returned to the Staff ten days after receipt.

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III. COMMENTS ON USE OF DATABASE i

< l The Proposed Order also envisions that the Board, after compiling all  ;

dccuments into a single database, will index the material using the Bluefish program and will then make a copy of the complete record available to each I party. Proposed Order at 6. The Board further notes, however ,that use might also be made of the ZyINDEX program. It is unclea'r whether this program employes the same indexing as Bluefish. In any event, unless a party has either the Bluefish or ZyINDEX program, a copy of such indexed record is of essentially no value since the database cannot be searched without it. It is questionable whether, in light of the minimal benefits to be derived in this proceeding, the cost of acquiring one or the other program would be justified. (Moreover, the Staff would observe that it is uncertain whether Bluefish is even available to the general public.)

At present , the Office of the General Counsel has only ZyINDEX, although it is hopeful that it will acquire Bluefish in the near future.

Accordingly, in response to the Board's offer, Proposed Order at 6-7, the Staff would request that it be provided a copy of the database indexed using i ZyINDEX. ,

The Board has also asked the parties to proEdi'ah' ehtimate' of the' total number of pages of prefiled testimony and findings of fact and conclusions of .

law that will be filed; the Board has estimated that the parties collectively will file approximately 900 pages. Proposed Order at J. The Staff views the Board's initial estimate to be high in terms of the specific documents identified by the Board, namely, prefiled testimony and findings of facts and i conclusions of law. The Staff currently expects that its testimony will be

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approximately 40 pages and its dr' aft ipropose'd

• fin ~ dings (which presumably

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. _ . . _ - _ - . - . - - - - - . - _ _ -- ._= .__- . - ___ _

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9-l the Board has in mind for purposes of the Proposed Order since they are to be filed concurrently with the profiled testiraony) wiki be approximately 60 pages in length. The Staff would estimate that PG&E's prefiled testimony and draft proposed findings will be about 50% longer and that the Sierra Club's will be about the same length as the Staff's. Thus, the total would be less than about 400 pages. Of course, if exhibits are included, the 1ength could well be about 900 pages.

The Board offers to bring the fully indexed database to the hearing where , subject to availability, the parties, in addition to the Board, may make use of the material. Proposed Order at 7. The Board should indicate 1 what procedures it will follow to allow for the equitable use of the material by the respective parties. For example, does the Board intend to permit the parties to have access to its portable Compaq computer during the course of the hearing and, if so, under what terms?

Finally, the Board indicates that the transcript of the hearing will be provided to the Board on computer readable tape. When the Board states that " copies are obtainable by the parties under normal Commission rules,"

j Proposed Order at 8, presumably, it has in mind that the parties may obtain either the traditional hard copy or a computer readablec6py' is accordance with the Commission's contract with the reporting service. ' -

IV. CONCLUSION .

For the foregoing reasons, the Board's Proposed Order should not be adopted for this proceeding. Rather, if the Board agrees, the Staff's and the other parties could supply the Board, with AIS-DOS formatted disks of their prefiled testimony and draft proposed fhi,,dings of fact and conclusions -

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. of law, and subsequently, their final findings of fact and conclusions of law in ASCII formt.t to facilitate the Board's retrieval of,that information.

Respectfully submitted, Lawrence . Chandler Special Litigation Counsel Dated at Bethesda, Md .

this 13th day of May,1987 s + %*

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'J5NRC UNITED STATES OF AMERICA NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

'87 ftAY 15 A10:04 BEFORE THE ATOMIC SAFETY AND LICENS NG BOARD OFFICF ~ -

.t In the Matter of ) 00Chu % M v,;u,.'

) ERANC" PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC ) Docket Nos. 50-275 OLA COMPANY )

50-323 OLA

)

(Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant )

Units 1 and 2) )

CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE I hereby certify that copies of "NRC Staff Comments on Proposed Order Regarding Electronic Storage and Retrieval" in the above-captioned proceeding have been served on the following by deposit in the United States mail, first class, or as indicated by an asterisk, by deposit in the NucIcar Regulatory Commission's internal mail system, this 13th day of May,1987:

B. Paul Cotter, Jr. , Chairman

• Bruce Norton, Esq.

Administrative Judge c/o Richard Locke Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission P.O. Box 7442

, Washington, D.C. 20555 San Francisco, CA 94120 Glenn O. Bright, Esq.* Ms. Nancy Culver Administrative Judge 192 Luneta Street Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel San Luis Obispo, CA 93401 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Washington, D.C. 20555 Mrs. Jacquelin Wheeler 2455 Leona Street Dr. Jerry liarbour' , San Luis Obispo, CA 93401 Administrative Judge . . ~ .. . . , , , , ,

Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel Rich'ard Lucke, Esq. .

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission 77 Beale Street, 31st Floor Washington , D.C. 20555 P.O. Box 7442 ' '

San Francisco, CA 94120 Richard E. Blankenburg Co-publisher Edwin F. Lowry, Esq.

Wayne A. Soroyan, News Reporter Gruencich a Lotyry South County Publishing Company 345 Franklin Street P.O. Box 460 -

San Francisco, CA 94102 Arroyo Grande, CA 93420 Managing Editor Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

San Luis Obispo . Suite 1100 Telegram-Triburn . ' ' ' ,'1726 M Street, N.W.

1321 Johnson Ave .

ashington, DC 20036-4502 i P.O. Box 112

San Luis Obispo, CA 93406

Dr. Richard Ferguson Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Vice-Chairman Panel

• Sierra Club U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Rocky Canyon Star Route . Washington, DC 20444 Creston, CA 93432 Docketing and Service Section*

Laurie McDermott, Co-ordinator Office of the Secretary C.O.D.E.S. . U.S. Nuclear ilegulatory Commission s

731 Pacific Street Washington, DC 20555 Suite #42 San Luis Obispo, CA 93401 Atomic Safety and Licensing Appeal Panel * (5)

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Washington, DC 20555 i

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Lawrence J. Chandler Special Litigation Counsel g S S

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