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Deis Public Meeting Transcript 5.15.2024
	ML24150A326
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Site:	Monticello
Issue date:	05/15/2024
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	NRC-2812
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Official Transcript of Proceedings NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

Title:

Draft Environmental Impact Statement Meeting Related to the Monticello Power Plant License Renewal Application Docket Number:

(n/a)

Location:

Monticello, Minnesota Date:

Wednesday, May 15, 2024 Work Order No.:

NRC-2812 Pages 1-54 NEAL R. GROSS AND CO., INC.

Court Reporters and Transcribers 1716 14th Street, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20009 (202) 234-4433

1 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com UNITED STATES OF AMERICA NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

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DRAFT ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT MEETING RELATED TO THE MONTICELLO POWER PLANT LICENSE RENEWAL APPLICATION

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WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 2024

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The meeting was convened at the Monticello Community Center, 505 Walnut Street, Monticello, Minnesota, at 6:00 p.m., Brett Klukan, Facilitator, presiding.

PRESENT:

BRETT KLUKAN, Facilitator STEVE KOENICK, Branch Chief, Environmental Project Management Branch 1, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, Division of Rulemaking, Environmental, and Financial Support, NRC JESSICA UMANA, Environmental Review Lead, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, NRC

2 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com ALSO PRESENT:

GEORGE CROCKER, North American Water Office ROGER CUTHBERTSON LEA FOUSHEE, North American Water Office SUSAN JEFFERY JOHN LAFORGE, Nukewatch RACHEL LEONARD, Administrator, City of Monticello KELLY LUNDEEN, Nukewatch DAVID LUCE LINDSAY POTTER JO SCHUBERT

3 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com T-A-B-L-E O-F C-O-N-T-E-N-T-S Page Opening Remarks.....................................

Introduction and Purpose............................

Environmental Impact Statement Preliminary Findings.

Public Questions and Presentation...................

Public Comments on the Environmental Impact Statement Adjourn.............................................

4 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S 6:00 p.m.

MR. KLUKAN: Okay, so again, welcome everyone this evening to the NRC's preliminary findings meeting for the environmental review for the Monticello Nuclear Power Plant, a nuclear generating plant with one subsequent license renewal proceeding.

Again, my name is Brett Klukan. It is my pleasure to facilitate this evening's meeting, hosted by the NRC. My colleague Jessica Umana will be on the meeting presenting tonight.

Our goal this evening is twofold. One, to provide you with an overview of the NRC's preliminary findings in our draft License Renewal Environmental Impact Statement, and what you'll hear is Draft EIS or DEIS. And second, to solicit your comments on the Draft EIS.

Okay, here's our agenda for this evening.

After some opening remarks and several introductions, we will move on to a brief presentation involving the preliminary findings of the Draft EIS and our associated processes. We'll then take a short time to see if anyone has any clarifying questions on the presentation, like how do I offer additional comments again, what are the mechanisms for doing so, where can

5 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com I get a copy of the DEIS and whatnot. After that, the final and most important part of the meeting this evening, we will open the floor to your comments on the DEIS.

So on this slide we have the two of our interesting speakers, their names and titles. And again, we have Jessica Umana, who is the Environmental Review Lead in the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards. And we have Steve Koenick, who is the Branch Chief of the Environmental Project Branch 1 in the same office, the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, in the Division of Rulemaking, Environmental, and Financial Support.

So this is a comment-gathering meeting, which means that our primary purpose this evening is to listen to you. Specifically, to gather your comments on the draft Environmental Impact Statement.

So we appreciate your patience of hearing out our presentation. We want to make sure that everyone who's joining us this evening has at least a basic understanding of that document, of the structure of that document, as well as the associated processes for how we move forward with the NRC review.

Please know that we are transcribing tonight's meeting, so I would ask that when it is your

6 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com turn to speak, will you please state your name for the benefit of our transcriptionist, as well as any organizational affiliation you would like to have captured. As we meet here, no regulatory decisions will be made at tonight's meeting.

Now for some basic ground rules. I ask that you please adhere to civil decorum, excuse me.

Out of respect for each other, don't just rob the speaking times of others just as you wouldn't want to be interrupted yourself. However, I want to make this very clear, and hopefully this will not be an issue this evening, but under no circumstances will threatening or gestures or statements be tolerated, and any such statements or gestures will be cause for the ejection from the meeting this evening. If you feel that you are threatened in any way, please come speak to me or one of the other administrative staff to communicate prompt and immediate action.

Now, if you something that you'd like to give to the NRC staff, please hand it to me. I got some and whatnot and we already got them out ourselves.

So, but as try to stay, if you will, in the carpeted area. Now without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to Steve.

MR. KOENICK: Thank you, Brett. And good

7 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com evening, everyone. My name, as Brett mentioned, is Steven Koenick, and I am the Environmental Project Management Branch 1 Branch Chief of our Center of Expertise at the U.S. Regulatory Commission. And I'd like to welcome everyone to tonight's meeting. This is our second public meeting on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, or GEIS for the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant Station subsequent license renewal.

So as Brett mentioned, today's purpose is for us to present our findings and to hear from you on comments for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Before we begin today's presentation, I'd like to briefly introduce the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to you and its mission. The NRC regulates commercial nuclear power, fuel cycle, research test reactors, and general use of radioactive material in a medical and industrial, and educational settings.

The NRC was formed in 1974, following the Energy Reorganization Act, which basically split the Atomic Energy Commission into an independent regulatory entity, the NRC, and what is now the Department of Energy, which does the promotional aspects of nuclear technology. I included the strategic plan from 2022 to 2026. There's a QR code there and the plan provides, sets out three strategic goals as the key to the agency

8 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com successfully fulfilling its mission.

The first one is to ensure the safe and secure use of radioactive materials. The second goal is to continue to foster a healthy organization, and the third goal is to inspire stakeholder confidence in the NRC. For the third goal, stakeholder confidence, we use meetings like this to engage with members of the public regarding how we conduct our processes.

I would like to take a moment to address in terms of stakeholder confidence, I would like to take a

moment to address and clarify some miscommunication regarding the presence of detectable tritium in the Mississippi River. I know we had meetings in which we reported there were no indications of tritium leak made into the Mississippi. However, as you have looked in our Draft Environmental Impact Statement, we do conclude that there were some very low concentrations of tritium in the Mississippi River.

These concentrations were very low, well below the required detection

levels, leading to the misrepresentation that the tritium was not detected in the Mississippi.

So we apologize for this miscommunication.

It is important to note that we continue to conclude

9 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com that the public remains safe, that the detected level of tritium were extremely low. The levels were so low that they would not impact accepted drinking water standards for the local community or the Minneapolis area.

Furthermore, the staff at XCel's review of this issue is ongoing. Nonetheless, we are reviewing our internal processes to prevent these types of miscommunication in the future. And we will be available after this meeting to discuss in more detail if you have any questions. I look forward to hearing your insights and feedback on the Monticello's DEIS, and thank you in advance for your participation.

With that, I will turn the presentation over to Jessica.

MS. UMANA: Hello everyone. Welcome, and thank you for taking time this evening to join us.

The time is very much appreciated. So we're just going to jump right into it.

I'm going to start with this slide with some background information on Monticello. Monticello is a single unit electric generating plant consisting of a General Electric Boiling Water Reactor. The NRC issued the original license in September 8, 1970, and was granted an initial renewed license in 2006. The

10 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com current renewed license expires in September 2030, and if the renew license is granted, we are looking at a 20-year period of re-licensing for the plant.

Onto our environmental review. In terms of our environmental review, we have a Generic Environmental Impact Statement or a GEIS, which addresses environmental issues that are common to all plants or a distinct subset of plants. Previous reviews for subsequent license renewal used the GEIS to take a softer look at generic topics while a deeper dive into Category 2, or what we call site-specific issues, was conducted. That all changed with the issuance of Commission Orders in 2022. So what we've done is created a site-specific environmental impact statement for Monticello, which does a full assessment of all Category 1 or generic issues, in Category 2 site-specific issues.

Last week at the virtual meeting for those that were there, I misspoke, so I do want to capture this on the record as a correction. What you'll see here in this Draft Environmental Impact Statement is a full evaluation of all generic and site-specific issues. Last week I mentioned that the Draft EIS was the full evaluation of all site-specific issues only.

However, since this is a subsequent license renewal,

11 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com we have to look at both generic and site-specific issues.

Here's a nice graphic to entertain you.

So this graphic here just shows you some of the resource areas that we take into consideration in our environmental review. So we do look at things like surface and ground water, use and quality, radiation protection and postulated accidents, air quality and meteorology.

Now as to how impacts are defined. The NRC characterizes potential impacts according to levels of significance for potential impacts, Small, Moderate or Large. A Small impact would be defined as effects that are not detectable or are so minor that they will neither destabilize nor noticeably alter any important attribute of the resource. A Moderate impact is defined as effects are sufficient to alter noticeably, but not to destabilize important attributes of a resource. And finally, large impacts indicate that the environmental effects are clearly noticeable and are sufficient to destabilize important attributes of the resource.

We do have some special resource areas that don't follow along with the categorization of small, moderate or large. So for federally listed species

12 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com in critical habitats, we use the language of the Endangered Species Act, which again is similar in that it has three category definitions for impacts: no effect, may affect but not likely to adversely affect, or may affect in a slight to adverse effect. So again, three categories.

For essential fish habitat, we use the language of the Magnuson Stevens Act, which in this case has four categorical definitions for impacts.

And those are no adverse impacts; minimal adverse impacts; more than minimal, but less than substantial adverse effects; and substantial adverse impact.

The impacts on historic and cultural resource use the language of the National Historic Preservation Act to define impacts as either there would be no adverse effect or there would be an adverse effect.

And then for Environmental Justice, we use the language of Executive Order 12898 to make a determination whether its impacts, if any, have high and adverse human health or environmental effects on minority and low-income populations.

Now to move on to the Draft EIS preliminary findings. This slide shows the list of resource areas where the impact was determined to be small. You can see that they include air quality and noise, terrestrial

13 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com and aquatic resources, socioeconomics, waste management and so on. For the most part, we found that the impacts on various resource areas due to the 20 additional years of operation of Monticello, we would estimate as being small in the environment.

Going on to other topics that use different categorizations, the ones that we covered just a few minutes ago, we see that for historic and cultural resources, our preliminary finding is that subsequent license renewal would not adversely affect known historic properties. For environmental justice there are no disproportionately high and adverse human health and environmental effects on minority and low-income populations as a result of the proposed action.

For cumulative impacts, this one is a little bit more complicated, so we don't necessarily slap a single, or have categorical definitions for this.

We do ask that you go ahead and look at Section 3.15 in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement if you're interested specifically in cumulative impacts, which considers the continued operation of the plant, along with operation of other things going on around the plant.

Now for ground water impacts, we look at several environmental issues, four actually, and those

14 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com are contamination in use, specifically non-cooling system impact. Use-complex for a plant that withdraw more than 100 gallons per minute, use-complex for plants with closed-cycle cooling systems that withdraw makeup water from a river, and lastly, radionuclides released to the ground water. All of these environmental issues related to ground water have a small impact, with the exception of the last one, which we found to be small to moderate. Again, this is a correction I wanted to make from last week's presentation where I said all ground water environmental issues were small.

For special species status and habitats, we have a preliminary finding that the proposed action may affect, but is not likely to adversely affect the critters that you see listed here: the Northern long-eared bat, the tri-colored bat, the whooping crane and the Monarch butterfly. No effect is seen on designated critical habitats or essential fish habitats. Our National Marine Sanctuary is present.

For alternatives, we find no new and significant information identified regarding the following alternatives in which power replacement includes natural gas and renewables, renewables in storage and new nuclear. And also, all these evaluations require that we look at the No Action alternative as well.

15 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com This brings us to our preliminary recommendation.

Based on its evaluation of environmental impacts, the NRC staff preliminary recommendation is the adverse environmental impacts of Monticello's subsequent license renewal are not so great that preserving the option of subsequent license renewal for energy planning decision makers would be unreasonable. That's a mouthful. So in short terms, the analysis that the staff performed, we concluded that there's not an environmental reason for energy-planner decisions to not allow the plant to operate for an additional 20 years.

Given the impacts on the environment, we don't see it great enough that we would say hey, you need to shut down the plant. Again the NRC has no role in energy-planning decisions of utility officials or state regulators as to whether a nuclear power plant should continue to operate. We can only provide the analysis of the environmental impact, and we make recommendation as to whether the decision-makers should take the option to continue to operate the plant off the table.

These are some environmental review milestones. Another clarification that I wanted to provide from last week's meeting is initially we were

16 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com not sure if we were going to hold a public meeting to get your comments on the draft, and we didn't want to put a date out there until we were close to draft publication to make sure that the 45-day comment period we gave was close to that date. So I do apologize for that.

To cover some of our review milestones, a comment period for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement started on April 19th with the publication of a federal registered notice by the EPA. The draft is published by the NRC's federal register on April 24th, with our comment period closing 45 days from the NRC's publication date, which is June 10th. If you provide your comments after that date, we will do our best to include your comments as we deliberate and work towards the final environmental impact statement, but we can't guarantee that we will accept your comments and process them after the 10th. So please try to get your comments in by the 10th. Our goal is to issue the Environmental Impact Statement by October this year.

If you would like to have a copy of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, I think I have like three more copies. It's a bestseller so please grab one. So I think some of you took copies already.

17 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com I also was able to drop off two copies at the library across the street. So they are in the reference section back there. If you wish to see an electronic version, we have the link up there, and I do believe the QR code also directs them to that. If you need a card we have some on the table outside. And again, if you would like to go to our Agency Document Access and Management System, take note of the ML number here, and then you can also read the Environmental Impact Statement there.

For additional information on the project, we do have a project website dedicated to Monticello, and that's at the link up here. There you can see the subsequent license renewal application, the environmental report, the current schedule, and the safety and environmental project manager information associated with Monticello. You can also sign up for the Listserv at the link provided here in the last bullet, if you like.

Okay, submitting comments. You can do it the old school method and try snail mail, or you can go to regulations.gov and use Docket ID NRC-2023-0031, and submit your comment through there. Or you can email our resource mailbox at Monticello Environmental at NRC.gov. And again, remember that your comment should try to come in by June 10th. Last week we heard that

18 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com June 10th is not enough time to get your comments together, so if you'd like to request an extension, please take note of my

email, that's jessica.umana@nrc.gov.

Now we're going to move into the question portion of this, if there are any questions on the presentation. I'm going to hand it back over to Brett.

MR. KLUKAN: Okay, so without any further delay, does anyone have any clarifying questions on the presentation or any of the materials or statements you heard tonight that from either Steve or Jess? If you do, please come up. The microphone is on.

MR. CUTHBERTSON: I have a question for Jessica Umana, about the regulator. I was just wondering, how can waste management impact be judged to be small, when the monitoring of the waste is going to have to go on for thousands of years. How can we say at this present point in time that the impact of Monticello's waste management is small when the jury is not out yet? We won't know how small it is until for the next, you know, this is going to be ages for thousands of years.

MR. KLUKAN: Could you state your name for the record?

MR. CUTHBERTSON: I'm Roger Cuthbertson.

19 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com MS. UMANA: Hi Roger, thank you so much for the question. Unfortunately, I don't have my subject matter expert here who fit the analysis in an environmental statement, but your comment is being captured by our transcriber so we will be able to provide a response to you.

MR. KLUKAN: Does anyone else have a fair amount of questions they'd like to ask at this time?

All right, there are none. We'll now for - I saw a hand. Would you like to make it from a microphone.

MS. JEFFERY: I don't need a microphone.

What are you gonna do with the waste?

MR. KLUKAN: Okay. So, what again, Jessica has mentioned, we don't have the subject matter expertise here to answer your substantive questions.

As you can see, the DEIS is very long and contains a wide variety of comments. Roger and Danica are here.

Excuse me, Jessica and Steve are here this evening to go over the general here's what the NRC does, here's how its process works. But what we'll do is capture that. Again, it's part of transcript as a comment on the DEIS.

What was your name? Just so - the reason for the microphone is there's a series of other microphones up here as well to make sure we can capture

20 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com that. But what was your name again?

MS. JEFFERY: Susan Jeffery.

MR. KLUKAN: Susan Jeffery.

MS. JEFFERY: Yeah.

MR. KLUKAN: All right, great. So we'll capture that as a comment on your behalf, as part of our meeting. Any other clarifying questions? Okay.

I'd like now to move into any elected officials or representatives of any tribe nations at this time, and then we'll get to federal. Any representatives of a tribal nation prepared to offer anything at this time? All right.

Okay, I know we have a representative from the City of Monticello here.

MS. LEONARD: Good evening, my name is Rachel Leonard. I'm the city administrator for the City of Monticello. I'm here to speak in support of the subsequent re-licensing of the Monticello nuclear generating plant on the condition that we continue to monitor the environmental impacts of, and I know that is being done in relation to the tritium water leak in 2023.

XCel's power plant is an influential part of our community and there are significant benefits if Monticello is to have its license extended for an

21 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com additional 20 years. The station provides a host of stable living wage jobs. It makes substantial contributions to our tax based, is a driver of economic vitality in the company, is civically engaged in a variety of initiatives and assistance for the city.

We also understand the critical importance of nuclear power, as XCel Energy and the state of Minnesota strive to achieve their clean energy goals, and we believe the continued operation of the plant is a key component of the responsible strategy to maintain electrical capacity as well as resiliency across the grid. We thank you for your thorough review of the plant and the potential environmental impacts.

And I thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight in support of allowing the plant to operate responsibly for an additional 20 years. Thank you.

MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much. Are there any other presiding officials or representatives at this time.

Okay, moving now to the public comment portion of the meeting. So that's a 30 - want to give like five minutes for this song? Does that sound about right? How long is the song? Give me an estimate.

MR. CUTHBERTSON: Three and a half minutes.

22 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com MR. KLUKAN: Three and a half -- so then I'm going to pack all the public comments at the end by 7:15, okay? Okay, so then I have ten people on here to do that. So that gives us about a little over an hour. So try to keep your comments beneath six minutes.

I'll give you a one-minute warning. I don't want to cut off anybody. That's not why I came out here tonight. But you know, out of respect for everybody so they get equal chance at the microphone, please try to keep yourself to six minutes. And now again, without any further delay, let us start with Jo Schubert.

Again, if you need the microphone brought to you, please let me know. Otherwise, please use the podium. And again, start with your name and any affiliation.

MS. SCHUBERT: Hi, I'm Jo Schubert. And I want to thank you for having this hearing. This is research by Steven Starr, director of the Clinical Library Science Program at the University of Missouri, and this is from his work entitled The Comparison of Japan with Radioactive Cesium, The Banana Comparison.

Radioactive waste producers like NSP and XCel and others often compare the radioactive waste that they produce with naturally occurring elements like the potassium 40 found in bananas. This is deliberately confusing disinformation, which is used

23 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com to make the impression that ingesting or breathing radioactive emissions from reactors is normal and harmless. This is false. Most naturally occurring radioactive elements commonly found in earth's crust are very weakly radioactive.

Potassium 40 in bananas, has an extremely weak radioactive specific activity, 7 millions of one curie per gram. Tritium, on the other hand, has a specific activity of 9,800 curies per gram. In other words, tritium is 1.3 billion times as radioactive as Potassium 40. Which one would you rather have in your bananas or your drinking water? Thank you.

MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much. Next we have Raymond Campos.

MR. CAMPOS: Can I go at the end?

MR. KLUKAN: Sure, okay, so we'll circle back to you. Next we have, and again, I apologize if I'm mispronouncing anyone. I think it's Dan LaForge?

John.

MR. LAFORGE: Poor handwriting. My name is John LaForge. I'm a staff person with Luke Watch in northwest Wisconsin. The Draft Environmental Impact Statement trivializes Monticello's major recent radioactive leak, which has poisoned the Mississippi and tarnished XCel's public image.

24 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com The 829,000 gallon leak of reactive cooling water highly contaminated with radioactive tritium, xenon and iodine, endangers 3.7 million people in the Minneapolis St. Paul metro area, and another 20 million people downstream who rely on the Mississippi River for drinking water. During water is the principal matter of fact regarding Monticello's environmental impact. Yet the draft Environmental Impact Statement only notes that the Minneapolis Intake Water Works are 37 miles downstream.

The leak occurred from late 2022 through early 2023, and created a plume of radioactive ground water, which according to the draft Environmental Impact Statement, quote, likely discharged to the river, end quote. The concentration of tritium in the leak was 250 times what's allowed in drinking water by the Environmental Protection Agency. Tritium permanently contaminates gigantic volumes of water that it comes in contact with, and it stays in the environment for 123 years or ten radioactive half-lives.

On March 18, 2023, NSC spokesperson Victoria Mitland told the press, quote, there is no pathway for the tritium to get into drinking water, end quote. But XCel's own annual Radioactive Effluent Release Report says, quote, there are several

25 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com mechanisms that can result in doses to the public, including ingestion of radionuclides in water, end quote. Mitland's public relations fib was committed one year before the NSC's own DEIS concluded, and I quote, tritium impacted ground water likely discharged to the river, end quote.

Chris Clark, XCel's president, told the Associated Press, quote, even if the tritium reached the river, which Clark assured wouldn't happen, it would dissipate within a few yards, end quote. This is twice untrue. Saying that tritium would not reach the river was false, and the word dissipate means to disappear.

While XCel knows full well that tritium persists in the environment for over a century. The treatment contamination becomes diluted in the river, but all the tritium itself stays there as it moves downstream.

Consuming tritium, ingesting tritium, even in trace amounts, is not safe. Tritium crosses the placenta. Tritium can cause problem pregnancies and tritium can cause birth abnormalities. It's common knowledge that the harmful effects of radiation are particularly dangerous to women, girls and infants and fetuses.

At the May 8 public hearing here in this building, the NRC's Jason Reed said, and this is a quote,

26 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com even if the whole leak had gone into the Mississippi, it wouldn't create a health threat, end quote. This shocking dishonesty is debunked by the NRC's own online fact sheet titled Radiation Exposure and Cancer, which says, quote, any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect. Any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk, end quote.

XCel kept from notifying the public about this leak for four months while it submitted its application for the extended license. All this dishonesty and secrecy are good reasons for the public's loss of faith in XCel's operation of the reactor and in the ability of the NSC to do any regulation. The NRC's draft Environmental Impact Statement makes the bogus claim that climate change impacts, quote, on future reactor operations projected in the renewal period are outside the scope of a license renewal environmental review, end quote.

This is contrary to the recommendations of a government accounting office report, which was requested by Congress, both to assess and to increase the resiliency of reactor operations in the face of climate change. The key AO report to Congress is titled, quote, Nuclear Power Plants: NRC Should Take

27 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com Action to Fully Consider the Potential Impacts of Climate Change, end quote. Moreover, ignoring climate change threats is a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. NEPA requires that the NRC take a, quote-unquote, hard look at environmental impacts whenever taking major federal actions and decision making that involve the public and due process.

The NRC's neglect of climate change in the draft Environmental Impact Statement is an unlawful attempt to circumvent these NEPA requirements. The NRC staff had two years to update its license renewal, environmental review process under the NRC commission orders of February 24, 2022. All it did in these two years was come up with the claim in the draft Environmental Impact Statement that the current licensing basis is robust enough to sufficiently address anything climate could throw at Monticello.

The basis wasn't robust enough then. It certainly isn't now, given an accelerated climate crisis.

The new information which the NRC says it must take into consideration, could well be an overwhelming climate-driven severe weather event.

Wildfires, for example, or flooding of the Mississippi, heating up the river water that makes it unsuitable

28 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com for cooling. Such events may occur too abruptly for any mitigation action. That plan needs to happen in advance and should have been part of the draft Environmental Impact Statement. The public deserves to know exactly when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will formally answer the government accounting office's report's findings and recommendations. Thank you.

MR. KLUKAN: Thank you for your comment.

Next we have Susan Jeffery.

MS. JEFFERY: I'm Susan Jeffery. My first point is that we don't trust you. We do not trust NRC, NSP, XCel, no matter what you call yourselves, you're hiding behind tritiated water, which I drink, along with, what, 20 million other people. We can't trust you because you don't tell the truth or you hide your facts.

In other countries this would be called corruption, but we don't call it corruption. In America we call it business as usual. Monticello is way, way past its due date. It's beyond pregnant.

It's carrying death. It's a zombie nuke, it's the undead, it will never die because radioactivity lives pretty much forever.

In this area around the Twin Cities, we

29 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com have a triple threat. Two nuclear power plants from Prairie Island and one from Monticello. But Monticello's not just another nuke. It's a Fukushima nuke. It just seems that money is more important than life, and that's too bad.

As I asked before, what are you going to do with the waste? I used to be a newspaper reporter at Cape Canaveral, and that was one of the most popular questions. Can't you shoot it up into space? The answer is no. There's too much of it, it weighs too much, and if there's an accident it will nuclify pretty much the east coast of the United States.

So just to reiterate, we don't trust you.

You don't tell the truth. You're way past your due date. You're not doing anything about it except looking for more profits. We've got a triple threat, we've got a Fukushima type nuke on top of the Twin Cities. It's dangerous, it's irreversible, and you must stop it. There's no excuse to continue this.

We have all kinds of other power sources. We need to grow up and be sure about the future because if not we're going to eat up the future.

So thanks for your time. Please take into consideration the comments about trust and about the future, and do something other than count your money.

30 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much for your comments. Next we will turn to Lea Foushee. Again, I apologize for any mispronunciation.

MS. FOUSHEE: I've heard it all my life.

I'm Lea Foushee. I'm the environmental justice director of the North American Water Office. And I'm here today to ask you, what's your plan if Monticello goes down? You have a terrorist threat, they could take it out, and they would take out Minneapolis right along with it because our water intake for Minneapolis is at Fridley, 37 miles away from here. Minneapolis has no wells. There would be no water except radioactive water that would do nothing but kill and maim and harm every living thing.

So what's your plan? What's your plan for water? Water for life? You don't have any, do you?

You have no water for life. You only have water for death. And more death. And I pity you.

MR. KLUKAN: Thank you for your comments.

Next we'll move to George Crocker. George Crocker?

MR. CROCKER: My name is George Crocker.

I'm the executive director of the North American Water Office. I have been dealing with the NRC since the mid-80s. And at that time it became quite clear what your mission is. You are enablers. You enable

31 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com reckless death.

Institutionalized reckless endangerment. It's what you do, and that is disgusting.

MR. KLUKAN: Thank you for your comments.

Next we will turn to Roger -- I know you said your name already. Cuthbertson?

MR. CUTHBERTSON: Hi, you got that pretty close. My name is Roger Cuthbertson. Thanks for inviting me to speak. I live in Shorewood, Minnesota, along with over three and a half million other people.

We are uniquely and precariously sandwiched between two aging nuclear reactors. Our house is located about 35 air miles from the Monticello nuclear reactor and about 45 air miles from the Prairie Island nuclear reactor.

Before I get to the question of whether or not to grant a re-licensing of the aging Monticello Nuclear Power Plant to the year 2050, when it will be twice the age that it was originally designed to run, I would like to mention a personal interaction my wife and I had with XCel Energy, which speaks to the question of whether XCel Energy, as a public, quote-unquote, utility, is maintaining a proper balance between serving the community and making money. In the spring of 2022, my wife and I spent $13,000 on solar panels

32 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com for the roof of our house, which would tie into XCel Energy's grid. Didn't expect the investment to really save us much or any money, even in the long run, but it seemed like a good thing to do to resist global warming.

On the other hand, we didn't want to get fleeced either. We didn't quarrel with the fact that the agreement we signed with XCel Energy allowed XCel to charge more for the electricity they sold us than the price we got for selling to them. However, some months after the installation was complete, XCel unilaterally increased the difference between the price they got and what we got. It wasn't a big change, but it really didn't seem fair. It's possible we didn't read the fine print of the contract with XCel carefully enough.

It was always an impossible conflict of interest in my opinion to expect the whole proper monopoly XCel heavily entered in nuclear power conserve community interest such as counting down on energy use for the sake of global warming, keeping the community safe and not burdening future generations with costs and perils related to energies which future generations would not necessarily enjoy. Plutonium waste, which is not the only waste, but the plutonium waste from

33 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com nuclear power plants such as Monticello, are 2 million times more toxic than cobra venom, and have a half-life of 24,000 years, and can't be neutralized by any kind of chemistry, such as burning.

The way I think about it is this is so dangerous using nuclear power in the long run. Using nuclear power for our energy needs at this present moment is like having a wild party that it takes the next 10,000 or more generations of people to clean up the mess. Do we care about our children and future generations to come? Or do we not? XCel Energy's proposal to extend the operating license for its aging Monticello reactor to twice its originally accepted life span is the epitome of irresponsibility.

To ask for this insane request when just recently the reactor leaked 829,000 gallons of radioactive water into the Mississippi 40 miles or so upstream from the intakes for the water supply of Minneapolis, this is unconscionable. The pipes began leaking in part because the radioactive liquids that flow through them are highly corrosive, in part because they were not thoroughly inspected. XCel Energy deliberately withheld the information that a leak had occurred for months, then lied about the extent of the danger, saying that there was no way the radioactive

34 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com water could reach the Mississippi River.

XCel Energy then claimed the problem was solved, only to later admit that there was another spill greater than the first. And then to finally have to admit that some of the tritium water had reached the Mississippi River after all. This is the kind of irresponsibility that shows XCel just can't do the job it said it could. We can expect more of these. The older the reactor gets, the same corrosion that caused pipes to leak might cause more serious leaches in larger containment vessels in the aging power plant. There could be a catastrophic event.

I say no to an extended license for the Monticello Nuclear Power Plant. Decommission this plant. Hold XCel Energy accountable for endangering and damaging the environment and humans, past, present and future. There should be an understanding that the assets of a company will be used to cover its obligations to its workers' pensions and the decommissioning costs of reactors.

XCel Energy should pay for future cleanup and storage of nuclear materials accumulated during the lifetime of the nuclear-power-generation Minnesota. If there was any money left you and Xcel Energy, after fully meeting its obligations regarding

35 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com the harm that is done, that money should be used to convert -- to bring energy production such as wind and solar in the future. Eventually, the Prairie Island reactor should be decommissioned as well.

XCel Energy should be replaced by a publicly-owned and operated nonprofit utility committed to a green non-nuclear future. Thank you.

MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much. Next we will go to Kelly Lundeen.

MS. LUNDEEN: Kelly Lundeen. Thank you for listening, accepting our public comments. I work with an organization called Nuke Watch, and I live in a small town of one thousand people named Shell Lake, Wisconsin. We are not local people. We would be in the radioactive plume if there was a meltdown at Monticello. The only difference between my town and yours is that instead of a large nuclear plant, we have a lake, a beautiful lake that a lot of people from the Twin Cities have cabins on our lake, and so that's where we get our tax money.

And the other thing is, I know the people work at XCel, they need good jobs, you're smart people, you could use those talents to do decommissioning, which should start as soon as possible.

I'm going to read from a study called Health

36 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com Trends Near Monticello Nuclear Reactor, published by Joseph Mangano of Radiation Public Health Project, about the health and mortality effects. The U.S.

reactors have operated for over six decades, but federal regulators have only conducted one study of cancer in local residents in the U.S. That report used statistics before 1985 and is thus outdated. No studies are currently planned.

Monticello is in Wright County, close to the border of Sherburne County. Almost all of the residents of these counties live within 25 miles of the reactor, and they are the most vulnerab left to exposures from environmental releases. The draft EIS neglects any mention of health and mortality statistics among people near the Monticello reactor. Researcher Joe Mangano has completed the report on death rates in childhood cancer deaths in these two counties.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, before and just after Monticello started up, the two-county death rate was 6-7 percent below that of other Minnesota counties for cancers and for all causes combined of death. By the late 1970s, the two-county death rate of Sherburne and Wright County exceeded the state rate for all causes and has remained higher since. If the local rate had remained 6 percent below the state, over

37 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com 4,000 fewer deaths would have occurred. So we're talking about local children, babies, and other community members.

Cancer death rates are also high. In the two most recent years, 2022 and 2023, the local rate was 9 and 20 percent above the overall state rate respectively. Many factors can account for an elevated risk of death, but one clue that Monticello releases may be one factor is cancer mortality among children.

Children are much more likely to be harmed by a dose of radiation than are adults. Prior to the early 1990s, local child cancer mortality was 37 percent below the statewide rate, but it has been 14 percent greater ever since.

I also want to make some comments not related to those effects, but just regarding tritium.

And honestly, I'll admit this, I have not read the 422 pages, but tonight was the first time I heard mention of there was an actual reading of tritium in the Mississippi River. I had read that it had not been detected, and I heard that it was likely, but this is the first time. So I'm going to have to read a little closer. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Website Radiation Exposure and Cancer discusses the dose risk relationship. So how much radiation can you be exposed

38 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com to and how likely is that going to be to cause you cancer.

And the NRC's own website acknowledges the linear threshold model which says that any exposure comes with increased risk.

Tritium is the radioactive form of hydrogen, and when it becomes part of the water it behaves the same as water. It follows the entire water cycle. Even if you weren't worried about the tritium in the ground water, the river water, the routine releases that we are going to be adding onto for your local community, 20 more years of water vapor. Tritium in your air. So that means if you want to protect yourself from that you're going to have to stop breathing. Everyone who lives in this area and in a 60-mile radius.

This affects soil, plants and food grown near nuclear reactors. They have been found to be contaminated up to 60 miles from sites. That includes the entire metropolitan area. While it may not be able to penetrate skin, there are other points of exposure to radioactive tritium, and all of the other radioactive elements released.

So I am here to say no action alternative.

Also, please extend the comment period for others in the community and in the United States to make their

39 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com comments. Thank you.

MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much for your comments. Next we have Lindsay Potter.

MS. POTTER: Hello, my name is Lindsay Potter. Thank you for hosting this meeting and for hearing all of the comments here tonight. I wanted to start on a point that Kelly ended with, that I know you said you heard about this already, but I think extending the comment period is a crucially important part of being sure that you can really hear from the public. I think a 422-page document warrants a sufficient amount of time to leaf through.

I even heard several NRC staff members on my way into the meeting tonight say that they haven't had time to make it through the 422-page document, which seems a little bit absurd. So I am all this given the comment period, I also wanted to note that now it's been a full week since the online meetings were held.

Extending the comment period was also mentioned then, and Richard Skokowski said that people should email him in order to officially file for an extension of the comment period or officially request that, and I would just like to say that I know he has been emailed on this point, and hasn't responded. So to me that means that the NRC is also not keeping up with these

40 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com requests and not responding to them promptly. And during a 45-day period, a lapse of a week without a response is a major blow to one's ability to make one's voice heard.

On top of that I would also just like to say that there was a list of more than a dozen questions and I know Jessica Umana has spoken to me about this personally tonight, but I think for the record it should be plain to say that I think those questions were in February and have not heard from any NRC office regarding the answers to those. So I just think that if the NRC is not going to be transparent and communicative with the people who are concerned about this project, that there needs to be, in the very least, an extended period for comment.

Now more to the point of the comment I'd like to make tonight. One of my biggest concerns regarding the DEIS, which I have read portions of, but not all of, is its lack of consideration for the safety of public drinking water, specifically the public drinking water pumped from the Mississippi River. Of course, we've heard mention that the Twin Cities and 20 million other people pull their drinking water from this river. I know that also in the meetings last week when we raised some questions about drinking water all

41 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com the NRC had to say was, Well, there are no private wells within the plume of the tritiated leaked water, but they do not in the DEIS recognize that the Mississippi River serves as the drinking water source for millions of people. It need not be just one private well because the river is the source of that drinking water.

The NRC says time and again that the 829,000 gallon leak of tritiated coolant water into the ground water poses no safety or health risk to the public, and you have just said tonight that the amount of tritium measured in the river is too low to affect the public.

But I'm concerned with the fact that the NRC makes and sets its own standards for what is a concerning dose of radiation to the public. The NRC's standard that they've outlined is actually 25 times higher than what the EPA deems to be as a dose of radiation in a year.

The EPA is talking about what is safe to a large adult male who is drinking two liters of water a day. So if you're a pregnant woman who drinks twice that much and has a fetus growing inside of you, your risk consuming that same amount of radiation is going to be far, far greater. So I don't see how an organization who sets its own limits, and the acronym they use is that the radiation should be as low as

42 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com reasonably achievable. So that clearly caters to the utility, to XCel, to the other operating nuclear reactors, that all that they're responsible to for the public is to get the level that's easy for them to achieve. But it doesn't match the EPA's requirement.

And I don't see how you can draw a line in the sand and say on one side of this fence what the NRC says is safe goes, but on the other side of the fence the limits might be different. And so in the DEIS you clearly outlined the fact that the river water, especially at high water stages, merges with and is indistinguishable from the ground water. It explains in the DEIS how the river water reverses its direction, the course of its flow and starts flowing towards the plant, towards the reactor and is inseparable from the ground water.

So I don't think that it's reasonable that this regulatory body could say, Okay, well here is a clear line and those waters can be kept distinct from each other. Even if you say that the amounts that have been found in the river now are too low to cause harm, I would say the river is swiftly moving. So when were those tests conducted, and how can any of the tests conducted after the fact really determine the full amount of tritiated water that reached the river?

43 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com Especially when the estimate for the leaked water was doubled a year after the initial leak? That still has not been explained as well. How was it determined that the quantity of the leaked water is suddenly 829,000 gallons instead of 400,000 gallons? And why should that estimate be believed to be any more accurate than the original one was if there's no accountability and there's no explanation for why and how this amount could so dramatically change and could be reported to have changed so far after the fact?

And all I would say is, in addition to that, is that the EPA is also currently reviewing their recommendations on tritium and ground water, and has published in the federal register the fact that they're trying to figure out if those limitations should be stricter. So the EPA is moving towards stricter limits, believing that the limit that they originally set, which I think they set in 1977, were very poorly informed compared to what information is available by today's standards and using today's science.

I would also say that I'm sorry to call your name out, but Mr. Phil Meyer, who is your specialist on ground water and was the consultant for this report, did not know that the EPA is currently reviewing those standards. So again, I see a large discretion between

44 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com the way that the NRC chooses to define public safety in the way that other trusted sources define public safety, and I don't see why you should be able to say that something within your bubble of jurisdiction is suddenly immune from this other oversight and immune from having to meet these standards of safety that are agreed upon by other parts of the public.

And with that I would say I don't believe that the NRC has proven that by making and following their own rules without regard for public accountability and safety that they can be trusted to deem the reactor's operation is safe. Thank you.

MR. KLUKAN: Thank you for your comments.

Next we will turn to David Luce.

MR. LUCE: Sorry, my mouth is dry.

MR. KLUKAN: No worries.

MR. LUCE: I won't be able to speak unless I water it. My name is David Luce, L-U-C-E. I'm a member of the Farview Neighborhood Plot Club in the city of Minneapolis. Several years ago I attended an event by some of your colleagues or former colleagues in the city of Plymouth, Minnesota, and it was called Waste Confidence. I'm a college graduate, went to college, and I couldn't ever figure out what that phrase meant, Waste Confidence, but I'll come back to the

45 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com confidence.

So my wife and I drink tap water in Minneapolis. It comes from the Minneapolis Water Department and it's treated with some chemicals for some issues.

So we drink chemically-treated Mississippi River water. And I actually like it with ice cubes. It seems to taste better with ice cubes, in fact, it's reminiscent of the water that I drank as a child from a 514 well in the Minneapolis area.

So confidence, I heard the term stakeholder confidence here tonight. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I'm interested in my own confidence in clean safe drinking water for myself, my neighbors, my family, the young families that are moving into Minneapolis with small children and who are having more children in Minneapolis. And I have to say that my clean water confidence, as far as tap water in the city of Minneapolis goes, is extremely low in terms of is this water safe to drink? And what are the consequences, the long-term consequences of drinking this water or raising children drinking this water?

So keeping it really short, my confidence in the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the federal government, is very low, extremely low, and my confidence that the NRC as a regulator of a deadly

46 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com dinosaur industry, while also being an apologist for this deadly industry, what sort of regulation of this deadly industry can happen when you're also a kind of PR agency for the whole industry. When are you going to actually shut down one of these extremely dangerous nuclear stations, nuclear power stations?

I'd like to ask everyone in the room how much confidence does anyone have that there won't be a nuclear power station meltdown in the United States of America in your or your children's lifetime? How confident is anyone in the room? That's my question.

And when is the NRC going to shut down one of these stations or let the license expire and not re-license it beyond its safe lifetime, if there actually is a safe lifetime for any nuclear power station. Thank you very much.

MR. KLUKAN: Thank you for your comments.

Next we're going to turn back to you, Raymond? I'm done with my list of individuals who indicated upon registration that they'd like to speak. Is there anyone else who would like to speak this evening, or offer comments, I should say? Anyone else? Going once, twice. You're welcome to come back up to the microphone.

MR. LAFORGE: John LaForge again. I'd

47 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com just like to reiterate that I too would recommend that the comment period be extended, particularly because issuance of the draft EIS was two months late, and that really crunched the amount of time we had to study it.

Add my voice to that too, thanks.

MR. KLUKAN: Thank you. Anyone else have anything they'd like to add? Or else we will turn to the song. So for the transcription, as well as to be fair to the camera person, if you wouldn't mind coming up here. Assemble yourselves in the general area.

I don't know where you want us to put instruments, but you want to turn this around or face this way when you play, whatever you'd like to do. I saw that you were passing out lyrics. I didn't know if you wanted to

- I feel like it's easier to lead a song if you're facing the people.

MS. SCHUBERT: I need to read part of this that I go over again.

MR. KLUKAN: Sure.

MS. SCHUBERT: So all I want to say is that this is a call and response song. The last sentence of each verse is repeated so people can repeat that with us if they would like to. I don't know if I can turn around.

MR. KLUKAN: Come to this side and then

48 NEAL R. GROSS COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 1716 14th STREET, N.W., SUITE 200 (202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com face this way.

MS. SCHUBERT: I could do that. I have to be on that side. Okay. Yeah, that'll help.

(Singing) I heard it from the trees and a mountain flower high. I heard it in the river and the fishes swimming by. I heard it in the earth and I heard it in the sky. Nuclear power is no good for you and I. Nuclear power is no good for you and I.

Power to the people, that's the way it ought to be. Power from the sun and thermals in the sea.