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Transcript of Meeting on Advance Act Congressional Report on Environmental Reviews of Nuclear Reactor Applications, 09-25-24, Pages 1-109

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Official Transcript of Proceedings NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

Title:

MEETING ON ADVANCE ACT CONGRESSIONAL REPORT ON ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEWS OF NUCLEAR REACTOR APPLICATIONS Location:

Teleconference Date:

09-25-24 Work Order No.:

NRC-0055 Pages 1-108 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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MEETING ON ADVANCE ACT CONGRESSIONAL REPORT ON ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEWS OF NUCLEAR REACTOR APPLICATIONS

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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2024

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The meeting was convened via Videoconference, at 1:00 p.m. EDT, Lance Rakovan, Congressional Report Lead, presiding.

PRESENT:

LANCE RAKOVAN, Congressional Report Lead, NMSS TED SMITH, Chief, Environmental Technical Review Branch 2, NMSS CHRIS

REGAN, Director, Division of Rulemaking, Environmental, and Financial Support, NMSS This transcript was produced from audio provided by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

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 T-A-B-L-E O-F C-O-N-T-E-N-T-S PAGE Introduction and Purpose 3

Opening Remarks 5

NRC Presentation 7

Public Comments 11 Close 107

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 P R O C E E D I N G S 1:00 p.m.

MR. RAKOVAN: So we are recording today's meeting because we wish to make sure that we get a full accounting of the ideas that you provide us. So yes, again, welcome everyone. This is our ADVANCE Act Congressional Report on Environmental Reviews of Nuclear Reactor Applications public meeting.

My name is Lance Rakovan. I'm a senior environmental project manager at the NRC, and I have the lead for this action being the NRC's report to Congress as directed by the ADVANCE Act. And again, I'll be getting into some information and some greater detail on that momentarily.

Our agenda today is fairly simple. We're going to start out with some introductions and go through our purpose of being here today and some opening remarks. We've got a short presentation that we would like to give to make sure that everyone has at least a fundamental understanding of what we're doing and what we're talking about today.

And then we'll go ahead and move on to our public comment, public input part of the session. Now you'll see the nice big graphic. Here is #ADVANCENRC.

That is the tag that NRC is using for all of the

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 ADVANCE Act-related activities that are going on at the agency, this being just one.

Moving on to slide 4. Again, my name is Lance Rakovan, and I am the lead for this effort. Ted Smith is the Chief of the Environmental Technical Review Branch 2 in NMSS, and he is my co-lead/

management support. Not exactly sure of his title, but he's doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

And with us as well is Christopher Reagan.

He is the Director of the Division of Rulemaking, Environmental, and Financial Support here at the NRC.

And I will be turning it over to him momentarily for some opening remarks.

But just real quick, we are looking for your input today on environmental reviews of nuclear power applications to aid in our efforts. For this part of the meeting, for at least the time being, everyone is going to be in a listen only mode. And once we get to the part where we'll be seeking your input, I'll be going through how you can raise your hand and how you can provide your input in that manner. And I'd like to stress that no regulatory decisions will be made during today's meeting.

With that, I'm going to turn things over to Chris for a few opening remarks before I dive into

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 the heart of my presentation. Chris?

MR. REGAN: Very good. Thanks, Lance.

Just wanted to make sure that everyone start with the same level of basic understanding here of the NRC's role. So before we move on to today's presentation, I'm going to briefly introduce you to the NRC for those that aren't aware.

As you

expect, the NRC regulates commercial nuclear power plants, research, test, and training reactors, nuclear fuel cycle facilities, and use of radioactive materials in medical, academic, and industrial safety -- industrial settings. We were created by the Energy Reorganization Act in 1974.

This separated us from the former Atomic Energy Commission into a regulatory body which is the NRC and the promotional body which later became the Department of Energy.

There is actually a QR code on the slide that you can access our strategic plan. Please feel free to take a look. It's a good way to get a feel for what the NRC is and what we do and why we do it.

There are three principal goals. I call them the legs of the stool that are the key to the agency successfully fulfilling our mission that you see there on the slide. These goals, first and

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 foremost, ensure the safe and secure use of radioactive materials, continue to foster a healthy organization, and we need to look after ourselves as well. And then inspiring stakeholder confidence, and this is primarily one of the reasons why we are engaging with you here today.

Under this third

goal, stakeholder confidence, we use meetings like this one to involve you in our processes. We learned during the pandemic that webinars or virtual meetings make us much more accessible to a much broader audience than we would otherwise have had in-person meetings here in headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. So we continue to leverage participation using technologies like this as we engage the public.

We very much look forward to hearing your insights and ideas today. This is a meeting for you.

We really want to hear your input and your thoughts as we move forward in addressing this particular aspect of the ADVANCE Act. And we're looking forward to your participation today during this meeting. With that, I'm going to turn it back over to Lance.

Thanks, Lance.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thanks, Chris. Moving on to slide 7. So just to go into a little bit about the

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 ADVANCE Act, on July 9th of this year, the President signed into law the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean

Energy, shortened as the ADVANCE Act, which was bipartisan legislation to provide a major boost to the future of nuclear energy in America. And our focus today is really on Section 506 of that act which is modernization of nuclear reactor environmental reviews. Moving to slide 8.

So under Section 506, Congress directed that the NRC develop a report specifically on the agency's efforts to facilitate efficient, timely, and predictable environmental reviews of nuclear reactor applications. And I'd like to specify this is under Section 103 of the Atomic Energy Act. And it also --

there's some suggestions here about using categorical exclusions, environmental assessments, and generic environmental impact statements. And as we move forward, you'll see that those are just a few of the considerations that we've been directed to consider as part of this report. Moving to slide 9.

So the scope of the report will include modernization of environmental reviews for all types of nuclear reactor applications. And to specify, that's advanced reactors, license renewals, power

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 uprate amendments, et cetera.

But I want to note that it will not include other licensing actions that are not related to Section 103. The work is primarily being done or at least being led by our environmental center of expertise or ECOE. And we're certainly looking to leverage things like our work on the Fiscal Responsibility Act or FRA amendments to NEPA and the ADVANCE Act itself.

And I'd like to specify that a number of actions that will be included and discussed as part of the report are things that we have already started doing. A lot of you may be familiar with the license renewal meetings that we've been doing for a while now periodically with NEI. And we've had a lot of initiatives going on looking for efficiencies and trying to make these efforts more effective.

So again, we're kind of always looking to improve upon things. And a lot of what we'll be reporting in this report, we expect will be ongoing or things that we'll continue to work on. Going to slide

10.

So Section 506 specifically contains several items or considerations that the NRC has been directed to detail as part of its report. And I'll be

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 going into those actually to frame our discussions as we move on to the input section of this meeting.

We are looking at lessons learned from recent environmental reviews across business lines.

And by that, we mean we're not being narrow in focusing only on reactor related reviews. We're looking at lessons that we've learned from, say, radioactive materials license reviews, and et cetera to make sure that we're taking a look at the full spectrum of the types of improvements that we can make. So again, we're looking for stakeholder feedback, and that's our primary reason for being here today.

So this gets us to our public participation. Again, we wanted to be quick with our presentation so that we can -- our participation so we can get to listening to all of you. So let me go through that real quick, and then I'll go through kind of what I have moving forward.

So what I'd like to do is open the floor in general. So if you do have some input that you'd like to provide, if you're on MS Teams, you can use the raise my hand button. On the phone, you can press

• 5.

Once we activate your audio, you will

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 still need to unmute. So on MS Teams, that would be the unmute button or the mic button again. On the phone, press *6 or unmute.

Now I do have the considerations that we have been asked to address as part of the congressional report on the following slides. I did intend to go through those one at a time to see if folks had input on those particular topics. But I did want to open the floor at this point just to see if there are any general considerations that folks wanted to share.

So I see we do have a hand. It looks like Kevin Kamps, you're the first hand up. You should be able to unmute and provide your input now. And just real quick, we ask that folks stick to maybe around five minutes or so with your comments at first.

We'll certainly once we have a chance to go through all the slides and make sure that everybody has had a chance to speak will certainly be open to going around again, or giving folks another chance at the mic. But we want to make sure that everybody has a chance to share today. So Kevin, you should be able to share.

MR. KAMPS: Hello, can you hear me?

MR. RAKOVAN: We can. Please proceed.

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 MR. KAMPS: Great. So I guess just to frame my overarching remarks, I wanted to refer to the Japanese Parliament's root cause determination of the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe. It was published in early 2012 about a year after the catastrophe began.

And of course, the catastrophe is still ongoing because reactor meltdowns have a beginning date and time.

But they don't necessarily have an end.

Just look at Chernobyl. And what they found, the Japanese Parliament, was that the root cause of the catastrophe was collusion between the safety regulator, the company, Tokyo Electric, and government officials. And I think the ADVANCE Act is Exhibit A in collusion between Congress, President Biden, and now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and certainly the industry which lobbies NRC and Congress and the White House on an unending basis to get these kind of results that benefit them and their bottom line but undermine public health and safety and the environment.

So what I'm getting at is I think that the ADVANCE Act is certainly not good for the environment going forward. It's certainly not going to be good for safety. And I say this from a perspective of

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 interacting with the NRC 32 years at this point, both on reactors like Palisades and Michigan but also especially on high level radioactive waste matters.

And just to respond to some of what the NRC introduction has said, I mean, we protested the NRC going forward with the environmental proceedings regarding the consolidated interim storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico. We were ignored. We had hundreds of groups calling for a delay until post-pandemic when people weren't trying to survive a pandemic so they could focus more on the issues being proposed.

But it wasn't just the grass roots environmental movement. It was a large number of members of Congress, including the delegations from the targeted states, calling for a delay. But there was no delay.

NRC rammed it through. We did our best to show up. In fact, we broke records on that subject matter. Many tens of thousands of comments were submitted opposing those dumps.

The ADVANCE Act seems to be an attempt to expedite all this to get to yes or approving new reactors, license extensions, radioactive waste dumps to the detriment of the environment, to the detriment

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 of public safety, human health. So we see this as a huge blow to all of those values in the United States of America. Granted Congress tells NRC what to do supposedly and President Biden signed this law.

But that's why I bring up the collusion.

There are consequences to this kind of behavior.

There was some mention by the NRC speakers of the pillars, the three legs of the stool, the success of the agency.

I mean, the agency has had some dramatic failures in its existence. Three Mile Island Unit 2 in 1979 comes to mind, countless close calls at other reactors, the trampling of environmental justice in New Mexico and Texas on the consolidated interim storage facilities. I mean, despite our record breaking number of comments on that scheme, those schemes, they were essentially entirely ignored by the agency, including the state of New Mexico's comments.

The New Mexico Environment Department was ignored by the NRC. So I don't know. The touting of your past success is a bad joke in some of these instances I'm pointing to.

And this latest development with the ADVANCE Act is quite concerning to put it politely and mildly. Advancing to what? To the cliff edge that

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 we're all going to go over together when the worse happens, a place like Palisades where NRC, including on environmental review, is just making it up as it goes, sort of taking orders from Holtec.

Holtec is calling the shots at Palisades.

And NRC is figuring out how far they can go to accommodate which is pretty darn far. And I'll close.

I'm close to the five minutes.

But at Palisades on this unprecedented restart that's unneeded and insanely expensive and extremely high risk for the environment included, NRC is depending on past environmental review dating back at least to 2006 on the initial 20-year license extension. And again, we were ignored. We had a very large part of the environmental movement of Michigan signed on to our comments.

And NRC pretty much treated them as if they didn't even exist. Thank you so much for taking part. Now we're going to rubber stamp this 20-year license extension as if you hadn't even taken part.

So there are a lot of people across the country very upset about the ADVANCE Act and see it as a violation and a betrayal of NRC supposed mandate to protect public health and safety and the environment. Thank you.

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 MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. Let's go to Benjamin Beasley. And you should be able to unmute.

MR. BEASLEY: I did unmute. Can you hear me?

MR. RAKOVAN: We can. Please proceed.

MR. BEASLEY: Good. Thank you very much for the chance to comment. I appreciate staff having this session. I did want to ask -- I think it was slide 9. You said that you are limiting it to Section 103 licenses. And so I just wanted to ask why staff is limiting the scope to commercial reactor applications because research and test reactor applications could also benefit from some of the improvements or planning for environmental reviews.

MR. RAKOVAN: So that is not a staff decision. That is direction directly from the ADVANCE Act. So we are sticking to what we are being directed by Congress. And that's Section 103 only.

MR. BEASLEY: Okay. But of your own volition, I think you probably could extend some of those improvements to Section 104 applications.

MR. RAKOVAN: Certainly. There is no reason that whatever efficiencies we gain through this effort can't transfer to other parts of the agency.

MR. BEASLEY: Yeah, okay. That would be

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 nice. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Sure. Eric Oesterle. Eric, you should be able to unmute. Eric Oesterle, are you MR. OESTERLE: Yeah, thanks, thanks, thanks, Lance. I just found it. Yeah, good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Eric Oesterle from NANO Nuclear. I want to thank the NRC for holding this session.

NANO Nuclear is a

designer of microreactors. And we have a couple of designs. One is a transportable design and another design is a mobile microreactor design.

And I think it would be prudent for the NRC in its environmental reviews to begin looking at ways to get environmental reviews done for mobile microreactors. I think we all know that the current regulatory framework is based on a fixed siting of nuclear reactors, including microreactors. But I think that there is a way for the NRC to look at developing a path for performing environmental reviews on mobile microreactors that could operate in one location for a period of time, say, a few months to a few years and then shutting down and moving to another location to operate for a few months to a few years.

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 And I think they could -- the NRC could look at developing a pathway to performing an environmental review based on a combination of what used to be called the advanced reactor GEIS and categorical exclusions as we all as other means that may be necessary. So that's something that I would propose the NRC look at as they seek to implement the direction from the ADVANCE Act. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. Looks like our next hand is Diane D'Arrigo. Diane, are you with us?

MS. D'ARRIGO: Yes, this is Diane D'Arrigo. I'm with Nuclear Information and Resource Service. And I am encouraging that despite the existence of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's continued storage rule in which you've expressed confidence that there will be a permanent place for the irradiated fuel high level waste from reactors.

I think the final rule says within 60 years of the closure of the last reactor that it's not clear how these would -- how this would apply to many smaller reactors all over the place. And now we're hearing potentially moveable ones. I think that communities in which these facilities are located should be made clearly aware that there is at this point no pathway to permanent isolation of the high

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 level waste that is generated from those reactors.

And even though it may be a different design and it may be a different size, it's my understanding that the radioactivity is actually even much higher in the waste that would be generated from these small so-called advanced reactors and that communities, rather than being stuck like San Onofre with people having head reactors operate for years in southern California and then realizing that there was forever waste there and now wanting to get it out of there at all costs justifiably. Anywhere that a new reactor is located should be made clearly aware that they are a potential permanent repository for high level waste and possibly even so-called low level waste. I mean, there are operating dumps now for licensed low level radioactive waste sites in four places, only one that can take it from all over the country or two.

And so the waste that's generated is not necessarily guaranteed a pathway for leaving that community. And it doesn't appear from what I have seen in the consideration that this is being revealed, that we're still relying on the -- the NRC is relying on continued storage confidence that there will be something when it's needed for permanent disposal or

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 isolation. Secondly, I would ask whether each of these reactors, whatever size, will be required to get a DOE standard contract for the long term disposal or liability -- long term liability and management of the irradiated fuel or the high level waste or the pebble balls that are created through the reactor operations.

So I think that it is incumbent on the companies that are promoting these facilities and on the NRC as you're proceeding to try to streamline their approval and licensing that communities be notified fully of their potential long term and permanent responsibility for the waste. And so that's one of my thoughts. And I understand that this is a dictate from Congress. But what we're learning is that a lot of Congress members that approve this did it because it was attached to a fire bill which -- and fires were really a big deal at the time that the vote took place and continue to be.

So yes, it is a mandate from Congress.

But it's also something that needs to be done responsibly. It shouldn't be done at all. But if it is, do it with full honesty and revealing to the public what the responsibilities are going to be to these communities. Thanks.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. I'll go to the

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 next hand. Looking to get some suggestions on environmental review efficiencies. Martin O'Neill, you should be able to unmute and provide your input.

MR. O'NEILL: Yes, can you hear me?

MR. RAKOVAN: We can. Please proceed.

MR. O'NEILL: Yes, this is Martin O'Neill.

I'm an associate general counsel with the Nuclear Energy Institute. And first and foremost, I did want to thank the NRC staff for holding this meeting.

And secondly, to thank the staff for its efforts to date. The Environmental Center of Expertise from our perspective has already implemented a number of measures to make environmental reviews more efficient. And I think those are paying dividends.

That said, we believe the ADVANCE Act does provide a very good opportunity to identify and ultimately implement some other measures. And to that end, NEI did submit a letter earlier this month on September 6th, in fact, before we even knew about this

meeting, identifying some potential

measures, providing input to the NRC staff. And I did want to emphasize that that letter really is intended to inform and support the NRC's development of its report to Congress where we're not asking for a direct NRC

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 response to our letter.

We would much prefer to see the agency focus on the task at hand. But again, we did identify a number of priorities from our perspective. They include finalizing and possibly permitting interim use of the NRC's new reactor GEIS, expanding the use of environmental assessments and findings of no significant impact, including mitigated FONSIs in lieu of EISes.

And the agency has actually done that recently through the exemption process in the case of the Kairos Hermes 2 demonstration reactor, expanding use of categorical exclusions, including mitigated categorical exclusions. And I would note we just also submitted comments on the NRC's proposed categorical exclusion regulation last week. Developing clear and efficient procedures to allow possible applicant or project sponsor preparation of draft EAs and EISes, potentially including additional guidance or templates.

Optimizing the NRC's interagency consultation and coordination processes. As you know, there's a lot of other federal environmental statutes that come into play. And the NRC does have formal and informal consultation obligations.

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 And we've seen some progress on that front. But we encourage the NRC through MOUs and other mechanisms to continue to streamline those processes. Another important I think is kind of right sizing the alternatives analyses and the NRC's NEPA review documents and historically alternative site analyses and analyses of energy -- alternative energy sources have been very lengthy and detailed.

And finally, again, this may not fall within the scope of the ADVANCE Act. But we would still like the NRC to examine some potential means to

-- and simplifying the contested hearing process, especially for environmental issues. And a number of these issues we did address in an appendix that was attached, Appendix 1 to a paper that NEI submitted on July 31st concerning rapid high volume deployable reactors in remote areas or microreactors and other advanced reactors.

So we did cross reference that in our letter. And I think the other thing I would emphasize too is the NRC did issue a SECY, SECY 240046, that addresses potential means to address the Fiscal Responsibility Act amendments to NEPA 2023. And we do think there are a lot of synergies between what the staff is proposing to do in that paper and what they

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 may do in response to Section 506 of the ADVANCE Act.

And I think lastly, we are very interested in how the staff might go about implementing certain measures or efficiencies in the near term and how that might dovetail with your response to the ADVANCE Act.

Ultimately, you may pursue rulemaking. But rulemakings take time.

So we would certainly encourage the NRC to, again, like, as in Kairos, use exemptions. Maybe consider provisions in hearing orders for individual proceedings to kind of implement some of these streamlining measures. And I think the last thing I want to say is in response to an earlier comment that the ADVANCE Act didn't materialize out of thin air.

It wasn't simply an afterthought or an appendage to another statute. I mean, we've seen unprecedented bipartisan support, both houses of Congress. They passed the act with overwhelming support.

It was signed by the President. So I think that's a strong signal that the federal government does view nuclear -- nuclear energy is a key component of our energy strategy moving forward.

Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. And I can tell

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 you that we have -- we are aware of the letter that you all sent and the team has it. And we are taking considerations and reading it as we put our report together.

So it looks like our next speaker is Madison Schroder. You should be able to unmute and provide your input. Madison Schroder. Madison, are you with us? All right. Let me try one more thing.

MS. SCHRODER: There it is. Can you hear me?

MR. RAKOVAN: We can. Please proceed.

MS. SCHRODER: Great. Thank you. Good morning or afternoon depending where you are. My name is Madison Schroder, and here representing Generation Atomic.

We appreciate the opportunity to provide input on the NRC's effort to facilitate efficient, timely, and predictable environmental reviews for nuclear reactor applications as mandated by the ADVANCE Act which we were really excited to see passed.

We'll be submitted more detailed recommendations in our written comments right after this. However, we want to briefly propose the following recommendations to streamline the review process here.

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 Many of these will actually be echoing the recommendations of the gentleman before me which I think is a good thing. The first is to expand the list of categorical exclusions, particularly for coal-to-nuclear transitions and fuel enrichment activities. The second is to increase the use of findings of no significant impact of FONSIs, especially for a first -- non-first reactor applications and license renewals.

The third is to adopt generic environmental impact statements as standard procedure when a full EIS is necessary. And finally, to consider recommending to Congress the elimination of the uncontested mandatory hearing requirements to reduce time and costs. These measures could significant enhance efficiency and predictability in these environmental reviews while maintaining rigorous safety and environmental standards. Thank you for your considerations as you prepare the report to Congress on this crucial topic. Yeah, thanks.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. The next hand that I see is Adam Stein. Adam, you should be able to unmute and provide your input.

DR. STEIN: Hello, thank you for the opportunity to provide input. This is Dr. Adam Stein

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 from the Breakthrough Institute. I appreciate the staff's effort on this work to implement a specific provision in the ADVANCE Act.

The ADVANCE Act is an important step towards providing efficiency for the NRC and resources to be more efficient and enable new nuclear deployment for public benefit while also maintaining protection of the environment and the public. A large portion of the sections under this particular section of the ADVANCE Act asks for the NRC to provide a report only, not implement new regulations on provisions that have already become statute under NEPA and the Fiscal Responsibility Act. This includes using additional categorical exclusions when appropriate, considering the appropriate level to view for environmental assessment or environmental impact

state, and considering alternatives.

In our view, a potential to revise Section 5120 which requires an EIS for a power reactor is also within the scope or was already passed under the amendments of NEPA and the Fiscal Responsibility Act because that section requires an appropriate level of review for the decision and a specific requirement for all power reactors that does not meet that -- the letter of that law. Additionally, as an institute

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 that provides unbiased research for public benefit and does not take any funding from industry, we would like to support the efficient process while maintaining public interaction for streamlining environmental reviews because nuclear energy by every scientific metric provides clean, safe electricity compared to the alternative which is largely fossil fuels. Thank you for this opportunity to comment.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. Our next hand that I see is Arden Rowell. Arden, are you with us?

You should be able to unmute.

MS. ROWELL: There we go. Yes, thank you.

My name is Arden Rowell. I'm a professor of environmental and administrative law at the University of Illinois. And I'm also part of a research team at the University of Illinois working on an NRC research great on the intersection of law and technology at NRC and risk informed and performance based regulation and licensing more particularly.

So thanks so much for holding the meeting.

I appreciate the engagement with the public in trying to figure out how to best respond to what seems like quite a tight deadline from Congress here. So one thing my team is interested in is the complicated legal context that the NRC is having to navigate

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 through to respond to the ADVANCE Act's requirements while still staying true to its mission. We're still analyzing and developing some specific recommendations.

But a few preliminary things have come up already that I thought my be helpful to flag about the implementation of this provision in particular. So the first is we think that it's important to detail the agency's response to legal doctrine change at the Supreme Court level. So the case, Loper Bright v.

Raimondo, came out on July 28th of this year and overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine.

The new case, Loper Bright, has the effect of reducing the amount of discretion that NRC has in interpreting the ADVANCE Act as well as actually all of its other statutory mandates too. So we've been thinking ourselves about how that means NRC should be interpreting statutes now in a way that won't be overturned by the court in future. But we're curious to know how your team is thinking about statutory interpretation of 506 post Loper Bright specifically.

So for example, it seems to us that the NRC may have to navigate words like the mission statement changed to efficiency and very carefully aligned with past court precedent and that it's not

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 going to be able to rely any longer and just have a reasonable interpretation of Congress' direction. So specifically what that means after 506 is that we think it's important for the report to identify and explain how it is that its interpretation of this provision is in line with the change -- the substantial change in court precedent.

And specifically, to the extent that Loper Bright creates uncertainty and the durability of the NRC statutory interpretations and that could have future environmental impacts, for example, in making grants under licensing regimes less durable or having future changes in law.

Those are potential environmental impacts even that need to be incorporated into the NRC's analysis. Okay. A couple other relatively quick points, we also note the important change specifically to the agency's mission in the ADVANCE Act. And we're interested in the interaction between that and 506 as well.

So I've already mentioned the change to think about efficiency. So we would like to hear more and would like to see the report eventually, of course, detailing how it is that 506 in particular can be implemented efficiently. And we note specifically

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 that under past Supreme Court precedent, SEC v.

Business Roundtable, it seems like that could be required, read to require cost benefit analysis in particular, including an environmental analyses.

So that's something that would be substantial change in practice and we think we want to flag for you now. And then also another important change, of course, in the mission is going to be the expanding of or reemphasizing analysis of benefits.

And of course, that has not been traditionally a focus of NRC.

So we're interested in how you are thinking about incorporating environmental benefits of nuclear power generation in particular into implementation of 506. And we note that there are, of course, resources from other agencies that may be helpful in doing that. Particularly the social cost of carbon as a quantified measure of the benefits of reducing climate emissions and perhaps some other quantified estimates, particularly those developed at the National Center for Environmental Economics at the EPA. Finally, we're particularly curious to hear anything that you might have to say about the interaction between 506 and the requirement in the ADVANCE Act to create microreactor licensing regime

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 and how you're thinking about the particular challenges that might come along with environmental impacts of many smaller reactors. Thanks.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. And I will say that I expect this will be the first of a number of meetings involving the ADVANCE Act as NRC seeks to respond to it and the various direction that we've been given by Congress. So you touched on a number of points that kind of spread out across the ADVANCE Act.

So I just wanted to give you a heads up on that.

Ernie Kee, Ernie, you should be able to unmute and provide your input at this time.

MR. KEE: Okay. Can you hear me now?

MR. RAKOVAN: Yes, please proceed.

MR. KEE: I joined this meeting a little late. I just have three kind of topics. One is that I worry that Commerce may not have in mind the risks of the fleet of reactors in thinking that we can offset fossil fuel production which basically is at a level.

Recently, I saw 94 quadrillion BTUs annually, effectively all from fossil fuels. And creating many, many reactors will be the goal to offset this level of carbon dioxide production. And I hope Congress has in mind the risk that will be in

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 front of them, in front of the country with this many additional reactors in service.

The second is I am a strong proponent the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's current licensing regime which is largely deterministic. And I think it's served us very, very well for many, many years.

And I really worry about leaving that regime and going into something new, especially at the same time increasing the size of the fleet.

So I think that Congress should pony up.

Obviously, it'd have to come from tax dollars which okay. But I think someone should in Congress or Congress should basically pony up the money to ensure that the fleet risk continues to be very low, especially in the face of a large expansion of the fleet. And finally, I'm a little bit worried that Congress might not understand what they're talking about.

Maybe they very well understand it. But I worry about transitioning to risk informed performance based licensing regime because I don't believe it has been well defined. And in particular, I'm worried that the measure of performance which in my opinion should be basically the prescriptive regulations that we have in place today should be the measure of the

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 performance based regulation which basically we already do in technical specifications. So that's kind of my concern.

I'm a proponent of nuclear power. I'm not a proponent of nuclear power accidents. And so I think we should step very carefully in a future where we expand the fleet and kind of lose their focus on safety. That's all I have. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. The next hand that I have is Pat Morita (phonetic). Pat, you should be able to unmute and provide your input. Are you with us? Pat, are you there?

MS. MORITA: Okay. I finally saw how to unmute.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Very good.

Please proceed.

MS. MORITA: So well, I got a little bit late on this. And I'm wondering if written comments are going to be -- there's an opportunity for the public to send in written comments. And if so, for how long?

MR. RAKOVAN: So you can send your written comments to me. My email address is fairly simple.

It's just my first name, Lance, a period, and then my last name, Rakovan, R-A-K-O-V-A-N, @nrc.gov. And you

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 can find that listed on the public meeting schedule page for this meeting --

MS. MORITA: I see that. Yes, I see that.

MR. RAKOVAN: -- or the public meeting posting.

MS. MORITA: I see all that. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: And all I can say is that as a previous speaker noted, this is a fairly tight time frame that we're working in. So I would just ask that if you are going to send something written in that you do it as quickly as possible so that the team can get in their hands and be able to consider it as we are putting the report together. So I can't give you a final date. But given that this is due the first week of January, you can probably guess if you've worked in a bureaucracy that it's going to be in concurrence for a while. So again, the quicker you can get it in, the better.

MS. MORITA: Okay. Thank you. I just want to point out too that this ADVANCE Act really seems like a mandate for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to go right ahead and okay nuclear. And that puts you all between a rock and a hard place. So that's just a concern of mine.

And I do think that Congress has less

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 knowledge than the public. And I think that it's really money that's driving all this because there's nothing really green about uranium mining on Native American lands and the most vulnerable indigenous peoples all over the world where uranium mining happened. Milling and uranium enrichment, all of this takes a huge amount of energy, and especially enrichment.

We had that here in Ohio. And then the making of the fuel and then talk about how much energy is going to be used. This waste is not going away.

We're going to have to isolate it for up to a million years.

It doesn't break -- it breaks down into other radioactive elements. And they all have different half lives. So we're not talking about anything economical here when you think about even --

even begin to think about isolating the waste and the cost and the effort and how much damage it's doing to the natural environment in the meantime.

And the fact that radioactivity is emitted all the way along all these fuel -- all this -- all of this stream. And it ends up being ten times -- as much as ten times the calculations, more expensive than electricity, nuclear than solar and wind that are

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 getting cheaper and cheaper. And Wall Street won't support it.

So it's going to have to be almost all public money that's put into it. If there are any profits, that's going to go to the electric companies that provide the electricity. It's not going to come back.

It's a lose-lose all the way around. So we just think that it needs to be tightly regulated.

And if it were tightly enough regulated, it wouldn't exist. So anyway, I'll leave it there, and thank you for this hearing.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you for your comments.

And just in case anyone else is joining us late, just want to reiterate that the purpose of our meeting today is to solicit comments and input that the NRC should consider as we work towards preparing our response to the ADVANCE Act, Section 506 direction from Congress that the NRC provide a report to Congress the first week of January, specifically involving environmental reviews of nuclear plants. So thank you for coming by today.

I appreciate everyone for participating.

And let's get back to the hands. The next hand that I see is from Connie Kline. Connie, you should be able

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 to unmute and provide your input at this point.

Connie, you unmuted there for a second.

MS. KLINE: Can you her me?

MR. RAKOVAN: Yes, please proceed.

MS. KLINE: Okay. A couple of issues, thank you for conducting this meeting. Excuse me. In my opinion, the current regulations for environmental reviews of nuclear power plants are already quite lenient.

Most issues that are raised are denied.

There's too much that comes under generic. I do have one question. Does the NRC think that the goal beyond a congressional report will be completely revising the regulatory the NRC regulations guiding environmental reviews? I know you can't give me a definitive answer, but I'd like to know if you think that's going to be the direction, the ultimately goal.

MR. RAKOVAN: I'm sorry, Connie. Can you ask the question again? I'm not sure --

MS. KLINE: Yeah.

MR. RAKOVAN: -- I quite understand.

MS. KLINE: Well, does the NRC anticipate that the end goal of this congressional report and this whole process will be altering the regulatory approach to environmental reviews by the NRC? In

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 other words, will the end goal be new regulations?

Does the NRC envision that?

MR. RAKOVAN: I would say that's one of the considerations. That's a possibility. I don't know that's a 100 percent, but it's certainly partially of what we -- or part of what we can consider.

MS. KLINE: Okay. I think a very good point was raised regarding the Supreme Court Chevron decision. I think that any new regulations are going to have to be very carefully crafted. And my last point is that in general I think that the biggest danger of the ADVANCE Act is that it makes the NRC more promotional and less health and safety and regulatory driven.

That was one reason that there was so much opposition to it. And the individual that raised the point that many members of Congress really did not understand or appreciate what they were voting on because this was tacked onto a fire bill that was extremely supported. So again, thank you for this meeting and I'm going to end there.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Very good. It looks like our next speaker is a telephone number. It looks like I lost them. I unmuted them and they

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 dropped off.

MS. DREXLER: Hello?

MR. RAKOVAN: Yes, please.

MS. DREXLER Hello. I'm Jackie Drexler (phonetic). I was supposed to unmute. Yes?

MR. RAKOVAN: Yes, please. Go ahead.

MS. DREXLER Okay. So I live in Valley Cottage, New York across the way from Indian Point.

And I'm going to just list some of my major concerns here. So my very first thing that I'd like to say as Kevin Kamps said that the ADVANCE Act is a violation of the NRC's mandate to protect public health and safety and the environment. That's the first thing I'd like to say.

And the second thing, talking about mobile transportable -- I don't know what he called them, mini -- microreactors. And I would just like to say that our infrastructure across the United States is crawling, buckling, melting, being abutted, involved in mud slides. I can't support microreactors or anything to do with nuclear energy that will basically be, like, transporting bombs, whether it's on highways or railroads.

If you look at the amount of railroad accidents there are, I've seen reports of the highway

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 accidents from the southwest where drivers may be a little drunk or weren't paying attention and they slide off the road and maybe go into a body of water.

And these things are going -- you're considering transporting these things on highways and railroads that go through communities that will not have the knowledge of what's coming through.

And that means first responders aren't going to have the knowledge of what's coming through.

And so that's the first thing that I'd like to mention. The second thing I'd like to mention is terrorism.

This ADVANCE Act allows foreign entities to be able to build and build nuclear reactors here in the United States. I believe that this could be a huge national and global security risk. And I was on a webinar that the NRC did several months where everyone is thinking of using AI and just getting rid of on the ground security.

So I have a big problem with that. I also have a big problem with the fact that the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was not renewed. The Price-Anderson Act limits industry to only 16 billion dollars if there is a disaster.

So what happens is that -- and FEMA which

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 is included in all of this does not have a radiological response division. And so all of the economic burdens go on to citizens. That's my third point.

My fourth point is that the NRC has refused to acknowledge according to the GAO report and according to every comment we've ever made, they refuse to acknowledge the effects of climate change on nuclear power plants. All power plants are sited near water. And a storm surge and sea leave rise are major issues and how that affects the nuclear power plants, even just components of nuclear power plants or the storage there.

It needs to be included. It's not included in any way, shape, or form. The fifth thing that I'd like to mention here is that it's not clean.

There are emissions from greenhouse gasses all involved in the construction of nuclear power plants and air pollution and water pollution.

And as the lady who spoke earlier, Pat, mentioned, the uranium poisoning of Navajo people and their babies that uranium shows up in baby's blood. I mean, you guys have to be kidding. And finally, I'm just coming up to the end here, that -- in fact, I'm just going to tell you as a local person in Rockland

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 County where Mike Lawler is my congressman. When I asked him about it, he was, like, what are you talking about?

He's the one who snuck it in. I'm going to tell you that every congressperson's office I have called, and I've called about ten different offices now. Not one person I spoke with knew about the ADVANCE Act that they signed. Okay.

So they can't look like shmucks by not signing the entire Fire Safety and Grants Act. And this was snuck into it. So Congress signed this and they didn't know what they were doing.

And finally, I'd just like to say -- well, two things. I tried getting onto this via your system. I could see the slides. I couldn't get on it. I did email. I called Lance a couple of times and emailed so that I could connect other than just by phone so I could see what was going on.

So that was a bit of an issue. And finally, I'd just like to say that your tight time frames for consideration for this report that's due is really unfair to the public on such a massive bill that is being rammed down our throats. We have to read this. We have to digest it. We have to see what your plan is and how it fits in with your new mandate

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 by Congress.

We need more time. I just feel that you're telling this lady that you have a tight time frame for the consideration of the report is really unfair to us. So that's what I'd like to say, and thank you for having this hearing.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. The next hand I have is Michael Keegan. Michael, you should be able to unmute.

MR. KEEGAN: Okay. Can you hear me?

MR. RAKOVAN: We can. Please proceed.

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you. I'm Michael Keegan with Don't Waste Michigan. I'm 40 years deep tracking the NRC. What I find appalling is the stealth nature of how the act got submitted.

Ninety pages of ADVANCE Act tacked on to a three-page must pass fire legislation. It was done in a stealthy manner. And it certainly betrays its trust of the public.

Congress said it did not know what they were voting on. I contacted Senator Peters' office to point out the proliferation ramifications of the act, and he was clueless. His staff was clueless.

I sat in on a meeting September 5th. It was all staff meeting with the NRC. And the last

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 question of the question-and-answer session raised serious concerns by the NRC staff that they were literally being abused by industry where they wanted the closed sessions where they were discussing advanced reactors. And Chairman Hanson's response was, oh, I had no idea basically.

So people are being harassed and coerced.

The problem, why things get stuck and slowed down is because inadequate applications are being submitted by the industry incomplete. And when NRC staff asked basic questions and RAIs, they're jumped down their throat.

The mandate of NRC is to provide public safety. And you're systematically gutting that and sending the message to staffers that, no, don't do the regulation. The industry is not doing quality assurance.

They're trying to do it on the cheap without doing the engineering and the quality assurance. And now pressure from Congress comes upon NRC to essentially gut regulation. So we're in a situation of a perfect storm with no quality assurance on these proposed projects and now pressure on regulators not to regulate.

In 1985, Congress commissioned a report on

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 the quality assurance at nuclear power plants. It's known as NUREG 1055. And defining at the time was so many plants were going down and being halted at advance construction phases because there was missing quality assurance.

Now the plan seems to be to not have any quality assurance and not have any regulation on top of that. Quality assurance is expensive, but no quality assurance is far more expensive. So the industry has been very successful lobbying and buying members of Congress, members of the Senate.

But you can't -- you can duck the laws --

you can duck under the laws of regulation but you cannot duck the laws of physics. And you're setting up a perfect storm here by which you're going to have a disaster upon disaster. Those are my comments.

I did submit some comments in the feedback form regarding the public meeting -- I'm sorry, the all staff meeting of September 5th. Please go to that video. Go to one hour and 40 minutes is when that question was raised.

You got problems there. Regulation is a good thing. Regulation is needed. Rules for the road are needed. To try to duck regulation is going to bring about disaster. You set up a perfect storm.

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 Pull your heads out of your butts and listen to what the public had to say. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. The next hand I have is just one name, Stephen (phonetic). Stephen, you should be able to unmute and provide your input at this time. Again, I just have one name, Stephen.

Stephen, are you able to unmute?

All right. We'll allow that. Actually, that has me going to my second to the last slide, I believe. If you do have audio technical issues, best things is to drop off the meeting and come back on.

You can call into our bridge line which is here on the screen or again can be found on the public meeting posting for this meeting. Or if you are calling in Teams, you can check your device settings.

Go to More, choose Settings, and then look at Device Settings. Sometimes Teams will default to a microphone or some headphones that you don't realize they're defaulting to.

Okay. I'm going to use this since I don't see any hands right now to head back and go through the various considerations that we have been asked to handle as part of this report just to see if folks have any feedback. So kind of a lightning round if you will. We've gathered some input so far, but I

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 kind of wanted to go through the considerations one by one, number one, just in case if folks aren't familiar with them. But also if folks have just some brief feedback. So again, if you'd like to provide some input as I go through these, please try to keep your input fairly concise, maybe a couple minutes at most.

And again, we'll take hands as we see them.

So I'll go through the considerations in the report. Consideration A is using through adoption incorporation by reference or other appropriate means, categorical inclusion -- exclusions, sorry, environmental assessments, and environmental impact statements prepared by other federal agencies to streamline environmental reviews of applications described in Subsection A by the Commission. And again, this is just looking for us to consider again these other NEPA-related documents from other federal agencies.

I'll pause for a moment to see if anyone has any thoughts on this. Again, just looking for hands and then hopefully just a couple minutes. Kevin Kamps, you should be able to unmute and provide your input.

MR. KAMPS: Hello. Can you hear me?

MR. RAKOVAN: We can. Please proceed.

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 MR. KAMPS: Yeah, just to return back to that collusion root cause conclusion by the Japanese Parliament about Fukushima. I mean, they included the safety regulator, the

company, and government officials. They probably should've included and I'll include it here the nuclear industry's lobbyists and their friends and other realms like academia.

Who prepared this list for Congress? I don't think Congress necessarily did. Maybe some staff were involved. But it sounds like the nuclear power industry lobbyists prepared this list.

Like, every single idea we can come up with to undermine environmental review, please give it to us. And like you said, it was a bipartisan vote.

But a lot of members of Congress don't seem clear on what they're voting on.

And in fact, some of the present votes like Rashida Tlaib, Democrat from southeastern Michigan, she said that she voted present because she supported the firefighters bill while very much opposing the nuclear power giveaways in the ADVANCE Act. So I'd just say, I mean, there are laws in this land that are constantly being chipped away at by the nuclear power industry and its friends. One of those is the National Environmental Policy Act.

49 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 I'd just say stop doing it. Like, Michael Keegan just said, you are playing with fire.

And so these laws exist to try to protect the environment, to try to protect human health, to try to protect public safety.

And what do you think is going to happen when you got these laws? And that's what you're doing. You're gutting these long established laws, half century old laws. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. The other hand I have is Adam Stein. Adam, you should be able to unmute and provide your input.

DR. STEIN: Hello, this is Dr. Adam Stein for the Breakthrough Institute on this specific topic that you've requested input on the screen at the moment, adoption of incorporating by reference.

Categorical exclusions, environmental impact statements, or environment assessments from other agencies has been considered in part. A recent advanced nuclear reactor GEIS rulemaking, the NRC as part of that scoping took a look at other agencies for categorical exclusions.

It is still reasonable to take a look at other environmental impact statements and environmental assessments that can be used. Once

50 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 again if other agencies have used this, they have considered in depth whether they are relevant or not.

And it does not change the law or impacts to the environment. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and move to the next consideration in light of time. For this, using categorical exclusions, environmental assessments, and environmental impact statements prepared by the Commission, obviously, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to streamline environmental reviews of applications.

So again, this is essentially doing some navel gazing on our part to see if we can look at what we've already done to see what our lessons learned or what we can do to streamline our environmental reviews. Any specific feedback or comments on this?

Adam Stein, you should be able to unmute and provide your comment.

DR. STEIN: Thank you. This is Dr. Adam Stein from the Breakthrough Institute again. I would like to speak directly to this request. The NRC recently did an act similar to this with the Kairos Hermes 2 review.

It is on the same site and adjacent to the Kairos Hermes 1 that had a full environmental impact

51 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 statement. And so the NRC used an environmental assessment instead as that site has been reviewed in depth. This is one example of where the NRC could make efficiency gains without increasing risk to the environment or public. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. I have a phone number that ends in 5837, 5837.

MS. DREXLER Hi, this is Jackie Drexler again who is on the Hudson River in Rockland County, New York on the shores of the Hudson River at the Tappan Zee Bridge now known as the Mario Cuomo Bridge.

So what I'd like to say, using the above with exclusions to streamline and fast track is a really bad idea. Just so you know, this gorgeous Tappan Zee Bridge was fast tracked.

And there are major problems with the support system because when things are fast tracked, there's not oversight. It's just let's do it, bing, bang, boom. Get a new bridge.

Well, now it's going to cost millions and millions and millions of dollars to fix what's wrong with it. So I am saying that this whole idea of streamlining and fast tracking, these things need more time and more looked after. We're talking about what you're calling new technology, microreactors.

52 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 These things need a

deeper

look, especially when we know that they create more high level waste and more waste than the current commercial reactors that are existing. So I'm just putting that out there that streamlining and fast tracking is just about the worst thing you guys could be considering to do. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Next hand I have is Kevin Kamps. Kevin, you should be able to unmute.

MR. KAMPS: Yeah, Kevin Kamps with Beyond Nuclear. I refer to it in my initial comments. But I'll point back to it again in response to this question. We are facing an unprecedented restart of a closed reactor at Palisades, not the only one anymore.

Three Mile Island Unit 1 seems to be drinking the Kool-Aid and jumping off the cliff too.

And in the Palisades proceeding, the NRC staff sure enough seems to be relying on a 2006 environmental review that we took part in, in very good faith. A very large part of the environmental movement of Michigan took part, endorsed these coalition comments that were summarily ignored by the NRC. This is under the current and maybe soon to die mandate of NRC to protect public health and safety regardless of the industry's bottom line.

53 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 now we're facing this very high risk restart, including to the environment of Palisades, depending on what is about to be a 20-year-old environmental review that was woefully inadequate at the time. So we live in terror. We live in terror of these bad decisions being made by Congress, by NRC at the instigation of the industry lobby. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Martin O'Neill.

Martin, you should be able to unmute and provide your input.

MR. O'NEILL: Thank you. Yeah, I just thought this one as an excellent example of where the measure could be applied across business lines. It's not necessarily specific to reactors. And I guess what I had in mind is fuel cycle facility licensing.

The NRC has prepared numerous EISes and NEAs over the years, particularly for uranium enrichment, the Eagle Rock GLE facility, the Urenco National Enrichment Facility, and American Centrifuge.

And to the extent we are building new or augmented or expanded fuel -- excuse me, fuel cycle facilities at or near the sites. I think this would be a great opportunity to make use of those prior analysis.

And I mentioned that DOE had just issued its draft EIS on the HALEU program. And I thought

54 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 they did a good job at leveraging a lot of prior NRC analyses. So it's certainly the NRC can do that itself as well. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Looks like I've got one more hand, and then I'd like to keep moving on. Michael Keegan. Michael, you should be able to unmute.

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you. Yes, I'd like to speak of two categorical exclusions. At the Perry Nuclear Power Plant which is situated on the shore of Lake Erie and they are pursuing a 20-year license extension, the plant sits elevated on a bluff in a seismically active area.

In the scoping proceeding for environment, the NRC blatantly said they do not look at the impact of climate, the environment upon the nuclear power plant. We've got a situation where adjacent properties have fallen into the lake. There are just upstream in New York where atmospheric rivers literally 12 inches of water dropping within a very short time frame.

Perry has major water drainage problems all around, tritium leaking from the plant, and will not look at the potential for atmospheric rivers, a deluge hitting Perry which sits on a bluff on stable

55 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 grounds in a seismically active area. But all that is categorically excluded. And I previously said you can duck your own regulations, you can get under your own regulations, find ways around them, but you cannot duck the laws of physics.

Mother Nature bats last, and you've got your head in the sand on purpose. This is willful and mindful and criminally negligent. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. We'll go ahead and move on to the next consideration. Using mitigated findings of no significant impact in environmental reviews of applications described in Subsection A by the Commission to reduce the impact of a proposed action to a level that is not significant.

Again, this is using mitigated findings of no significant impact. I'll pause for a second to see if anyone has any quick input they'd like to provide on this consideration. All right. Seeing no hands --

oh, okay. We've got one quick one. Kevin, go ahead.

And please be quick if you would.

MR. KAMPS: Yeah, just real quickly. It seems like it flies in the face of the required analysis of cumulative impacts for one thing. If you have enough cumulative impacts, even if they're all small, you add them together and they form a very

56 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 large impact over time. So that seems like a clear problem under NEPA to me.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. We have our phone number ending in 5837 again. Should be able to unmute.

MS. DREXLER Hi there. It's Jackie Drexler again.

MR. RAKOVAN: Yes.

MS. DREXLER So I don't have my dictionary in front of me. But I think part of the problem here is that we or I have different kind of dictionary definition in my head of what the word significant means and what the word impact means. So your definition doesn't follow like the rest of the world's definition but are significant impacts.

Storm surge is a significant impact.

Okay. I'm just saying there's so many significant impacts. The tritium leakages, the evaporation of tritium laden water into the air, the disposal methods that are allowed, there's so many impacts to human life and the environment and all of the life that lives in the environment. So I think that your definitions are very much lacking according to the rest of the world's definitions of what is significant and what is impact. Thank you.

57 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. RAKOVAN: All right. And Martin O'Neill, Martin, you should be able to unmute.

MR. O'NEILL: Yeah, thanks again. I just would note we did address this issue among others in our letter but note that it's something that's already consistent with NRC guidance and our office instruction LIC-203 as well as agency practice and the practice of other agencies, CEQ regs. So it is a legally permissible approach that we support. In fact, we believe it should be expended to categorical

-- certain categorical exclusions. So thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Great. And I see Philip Hult. Phillip, you should be able to unmute.

MR. HULT: Absolutely. Thanks for taking the comments. So my name is Phillip Hult --

(Audio interference.)

MR. RAKOVAN: Philip, we lost you there for a second.

MR. HULT: Oh, my. How's this?

MR. RAKOVAN: There you go. Please restart your comments.

MR. HULT: So I'm Philip with Generation Atomic. And one of the things I think is important about the findings of no significant impact is that it's part of the ADVANCE Act. We're trying to make

58 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 sure that the input and evaluation of our impact are done thoroughly but also expeditiously.

And one of the important bits about significant impact findings is that they generally rely on previous findings which have found that some particular -- it's already basically already been litigated or already been discussed. And so the ability to bring in information about what was learned during previous impact studies, whether that be (audio interference) is important in that it allows people to work from a common base of knowledge while expediting the approval process so that we can concentrate on those areas of the environmental impact that are significant to an individual application. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. We'll now go ahead and move on to the next consideration. The extent to which the NRC may rely on prior studies or analyses prepared by federal, state, and local governmental permitting agencies to streamline environmental reviews of applications. So again, similar to other considerations, this one is asking that we leverage other studies or analyses as several levels, federal, state, and local.

So I'll pause for a second to see if anyone has some quick input that they would like to

59 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 share on this consideration. Adam Stein, you should be able to unmute.

DR. STEIN: Hello, this is Adam Stein from the Breakthrough Institute. This consideration is appropriate as long as the NRC has the ability and they do under this request for study to review that the other studies from other federal, state, and local governmental permitting agencies were complete as it relates to nuclear energy siting and environmental review. This is also a similar consideration for Section E on the next slide. So I reiterate my comment for that slide. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. And again, we have our caller 5837.

MS. DREXLER: It's Jackie Drexler again.

I am just a person. I'm not an expert the way many of these people are. I'd like to reference that at Indian Point, there was a pre-construction study. It was a 20-mile study of environment.

And I'm thinking that any new construction of any kind of nuclear reactors should be a pre-construction study. And we're excited this is being sited on a place that's already there. It's new construction.

It should be having a pre-construction

60 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 study of the environment. There needs to be some baselines here so that the public has an understanding of what's existing and what could be happening. And I really -- I'm so mad that you would use existing studies.

The other people have talked about it several times. They referenced the study from 2006 and their comments, and they were totally ignored.

And you are using information that anything from 20 to 50 years old. That's what you're doing.

And this is wrong. I mean, doctors don't do that. Why would you be doing that, and for things that are affecting public health and the environment?

You need to be doing real new studies and not just using existing studies that are ancient. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Kevin Kamps.

Kevin, you should be able to unmute.

MR. KAMPS: Thanks. Yeah, just to be quick, be aware of the echo chamber effect. I mean, if the nuclear power lobby can dominate the federal government in terms of the best democracy money can buy as we've talked about already, Congress, the White House, the NRC. The list goes on.

Imagine what they can do at the state level. And we're seeing it. We're seeing it in

61 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 Michigan. So beware of the echo chamber and what it might lead to. I think that the NRC should stick with its safety mandate, its health and environmental protection mandate and not allow it to be adulterated with the industry's bottom line.

And certainly don't echo the bought and paid for Van Buren County government in southwest Michigan or even the state government of Michigan which simply doesn't even know what it's talking about. But boy, they really love these promises of economic expansion that they're blinded by to the risks. They are blinded to the risks to the environment. So I don't think this is a good idea.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. We've got one last comment before I move on. Michael Keegan.

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you. I'm a sociologist by trade. And what we've got here is a situation by the NRC looking to set up a process why we brought the public out. They made comments. Now you have plausible deniability.

The NRC is seeking plausible deniability.

Bottom

line, it's going to be culpability.

Culpability and remember every one of you who put your name, signs off, is going to be culpable.

You're setting up a crime, a crime of

62 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 negligence where you are providing no oversight which is your mandate. And you're allowing the industry to get by without quality assurance all based on their financial gain. So culpability is what I will leave you with. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. I'm going to move on to the next consideration, opportunities to coordinate the development of environmental assessments and environmental impact statements with other federal agencies to avoid duplicative environmental reviews and to streamline environmental reviews of applications. This calls back to one of the previous considerations involving federal--using other federal agencies, EISs or NEPA documents. But again, this is coordination of the development of NEPA-related documents. So I'll go ahead and pause for a moment, see if we have any hands. Kevin Kamps.

MR. KAMPS: Yeah, I add a warning about depending on the Department of Energy. As you mentioned in your introduction, the Atomic Energy Commission had this schizophrenic mandate to promote nuclear power and also supposedly regulate its safety environmental impact, health impact. That didn't work after a while.

And that was recognized and Congress made

63 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 a change. And NRC was established to protect those values while DOE was allowed to continue to promote nuclear, kind of blinded to the risks apparently. So I'd be aware of promotional agencies like the Department of Energy. That's why the NRC exists, to balance that. So yeah, be careful of other promoters like DOE. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Martin O'Neill.

Martin, you should be able to unmute. Martin, are you with us?

MR. O'NEILL: There we go.

MR. RAKOVAN: There you go. Okay.

MR. O'NEILL: Sorry. There was a little delay. No, I would just simply point out that the NRC does, in fact, routinely coordinate with our agencies.

Sometimes it's cooperating agencies, whether it's the Corps of Engineers or there's any number of agencies depending on the specific project. So I think that's entirely appropriate and established practice.

I think one area, again, that we identified, our letter that's raised some concerns for us is pre-construction activities for DOE funded NRC license projects. DOE understandably is trying to meet its NEPA (audio interference) in some cases environmental assessments. And then the NRC in turn

64 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 would ultimately consider -- typically consider pre-construction activities as part of its cumulative impact assessment.

So there is some potential duplication there. And so we would encourage the NRC and DOE to find ways to optimize the NEPA process for those kind of site prep pre-construction activities. And it may just be that the NRC leverages too what DOE does, but I think that's an area that's ripe for coordination under the agency's MOU. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. Pat Morita.

Pat, you should be able to unmute and provide your input.

MS. MORITA: Okay. I know how to do that now.

MR. RAKOVAN: Excellent.

MS. MORITA: Yeah, so well, I'm confused about what the word, streamline, means in this case.

Can you give me some example of how things need to be streamlined?

MR. RAKOVAN: I'm given that the general direction that this report is looking to focus on efficiencies. I can only assume that the word streamline here is meant to imply that we are looking to make the process more efficient, the environmental

65 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 review process more efficient.

MS. MORITA: And you mention -- that's still confusing to me and it probably is to you as well. It needs to be safe. Whose definition of efficient is problematic, I think. And so are there are a lot of duplicative things happening now where the Department of Energy requires something and then the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires something?

And if it's all -- it sounds -- from an unpaid person here from the public, it sounds like if they had done the work that they would qualify under either agency.

So can you give me some examples of how things are now duplicative?

MR. RAKOVAN: I don't have that kind of information. And our primary purpose here is to receive information. If you'd like, I can take your information and try to get back to you after this meeting. But again, we're primarily looking to receive input during this meeting.

(Simultaneous speaking.)

MR. RAKOVAN: And I don't have that information at hand.

MS. MORITA: So my input would be to complain that there might be -- that this duplicative and streamline is just -- it just does seem like it's

66 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 it's -- clearly streamline seems like it's something that's going to make it more better and simpler and less expensive for the industry. And when you were talking about nuclear radioactive anything, I don't personally -- I personally don't want it streamlined.

So I guess that would be my input, and thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Very good. I'm going to go ahead and go on to the next consideration that we're being asked to discuss as part of this report, opportunities to, and there's that word again, streamline, formal and informal consultations and coordination with other federal, state, and local governmental permitting agencies during environmental reviews of applications. So again, the focus of this consideration is consultations and coordination, again, with federal, state, and local governmental permitting agencies. Kevin Kamps.

MR. KAMPS: I think that runs afoul of ex parte communications under law. These are contested proceedings and all parties need to have access to all information. So secretive meetings behind the scenes are not acceptable, including with the industry by the way.

MR. RAKOVAN: Okay. Pause for a second to see if we get anymore hands on this one. I note that

67 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've got about 20 minutes left of our scheduled time.

Not sure that we have a drop dead time of 4:00 o'clock but just noting that. Michael Keegan.

MR. KEEGAN: Yeah, this seems very much like what's known as manufactured consent. You choose out and you pick who you want to hear from. And so you're just kind of fudging the whole process to get to yes.

And it's at your own peril. You're setting up a perfect storm. And again, the forensics, when the ax goes down, the forensic will look back.

Who signed the document?

We're really talking about culpability.

And if you as a staffer, NRC senior staff or agency administrator want to put your name on it, you think about the word, culpability. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Adam Stein.

Adam, you should be able to unmute.

DR. STEIN: Hello, this is Dr. Adam Stein from the Breakthrough Institute. There is already appropriate and formal and informal consultation between these agencies. This is merely a request to see how those already existing communications can be more efficient and reduce barriers.

Improving communication between agencies

68 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 is something that should be considered in not just environmental reviews but every opportunity. It's not a matter of whether this will increasing permitting or environmental reviews, allow things to be easier for nuclear plants to be licensed, for instance. It is efficiency of federal agencies and local agencies being able to talk to each other. Therefore, it does not run afoul of the law in my view and should be considered in not just environmental review but every category.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Bill Dam. Bill, you should be able to unmute and provide your input at this time.

MR. DAM: Hi, this is Bill Dam. I'm an environmental consultant. And I was curious where tribal nations, sovereign governments fit into this.

I don't see tribal mentioned.

And a previous comment was that there's uranium mining on tribal sites, there's milling.

There's transportation. So there's a lot of different tribal groups are involved.

I know that there's a stakeholder forum with Department of Energy. So how would -- I guess the comment would be on -- whether it be SMRs or microreactors, the new types of designs, how will you

69 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 incorporate and make sure you're adequately coordinating with tribal governments. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Appreciate that. I'd like to note that the language that I have here is taken directly from the ADVANCE Act. But that doesn't mean that we are not going to be considering interactions with tribal governments as part of our report. So I appreciate you bringing that to our attention.

Jackie, you could go ahead and unmute. Again, Jackie at 5837.

MS. DREXLER: Hi there. So once again, I go back to -- and Pat just mentioned it, this lady named Pat, about what does streamline mean. I really have to caution you all about this opportunity to streamline with agencies for environmental reviews of applications. These things need more oversight and more time.

They are not proven. They are dangerous bombs if they're in trucks or on rails. And you have an obligation of the NRC to protect safety, public health, and the environment.

And you are now mandated by Congress to be promoters of nuclear energy. And I guess it was Kevin Kamps. I'm not sure who mentioned it. But in the beginning, the NRC was created because of

70 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 schizophrenic thing of having two things in one.

And you really need to be thinking more about the initial obligation of protecting public health, safety, and environment. And streamlining is not going to be helping that. So thank you.

And also, I'd like to just say regarding tribal nations, I was at a federal energy regulatory commission where they say they're including tribal nations in their decisions and they're not. And quite honestly, typically what I've seen with the NRC is that tribal nations are pretty much ignored. Doesn't matter that there's proof that there's dangers and there's health consequences. They're ignored. So I hope that you're going to be doing better on that front. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Martin O'Neill, you should be able to unmute.

MR. O'NEILL: Yeah, thank you again. This is Marty O'Neill with NEI. Again, on this one, I just want to point out that there's already some excellent recommendations from the NRC staff contained in SECY 24046 which relates to the FRA amendments to NEPA.

So I'd encourage you to take a look at those, for example, using the pre-op engagement process to prepare for and initiate consultations with

71 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 relevant agencies and tribal governments, establishing the acceptance criteria for information that an applicant needs to submit to comply with other environment statutes. So less information needs to be gathered later in the licensing process. Revising NRC guidance to perhaps allow applicants to engage in consultation activities to the maximum extent possible under law, not as a proxy for the NRC but just to get the process moving. And I do understand that the NRC is looking at drafting a new policy statement that would outline expectations for lead participating and cooperating agencies. So I'd encourage your team to look at those staff recommendations.

MR. RAKOVAN: Very good. Jeffrey Merrifield. Jeff, you should be able to unmute and provide your input.

MR. MERRIFIELD: Thank you very much.

Jeff Merrifield, Pillsbury Law Firm. A couple of comments I'd want to make. The first one is I've been dealing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission either during my time in working in Congress, working at the Commission, and since then, since 1986.

And I would say knowing the staff and the folks who are managing the agency, I think it is an agency that is dedicated towards safety mission. That

72 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 is obviously its mandate within the Atomic Energy Act.

And I think the folks at the agency take that quite seriously.

And so I would certainly want to defend the agency staff in that regard. I would also say I believe it does so in an independent way. There are lots of things industry would like that it doesn't get.

There are a lot of things that others would like that they don't get. I think the agency calls balls and strikes as they see appropriate. In the context of the Atomic Energy Act, that safety mission is there.

There's also in the Atomic Energy Act the notion that if the agency determines that a nuclear technology is safe, it has to license it. Congress, whether folks like it or not, the act has been changed to require the agency to be efficient. Now it seems to me people can argue whether the folks up in Congress were informed about that or not. But an 88 to 2 vote in the Senate is a pretty strong message.

And

frankly, that was also where the Biden administration was coming from in the decision of President Biden to sign that language into law.

So I think what the staff is talking about

73 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 here in terms of reviewing these to make sure that duplicative actions were avoided in the notion of streamlining that process again with the notion of making sure that the agency is meeting its safety mission but in a manner which is efficient and effective I think is perfectly appropriate. And so I would disagree with the notion that the agency is trying to short shrift important safety considerations in any regard. And so I just want to leave that comment on behalf of the staff.

MR. RAKOVAN: Okay. Connie Kline.

MS. KLINE: Excuse me. Can you hear me?

MR. RAKOVAN: Yeah.

MS. KLINE: Okay. I think that too many people are trying to dance around the purpose of the ADVANCE Act. Excuse me. Its purpose is in its title.

It's to advance nuclear power.

And as well intentioned as the NRC may be, some would possibly disagree with that, there's a tremendous amount of pressure. There always has been, but there's increased pressure now with -- excuse me, with the passage of this act. And again, I say -- and I certainly haven't surveyed the entire Congress or the Senate.

But there was a lot of confusion and

74 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 people are representative, really to a large extent did not understand what they were voting for. It's a common thing with Congress. And it gets into the whole issue of the Chevron Act.

But to me, we can play around with semantics. But streamlining means fast tracking as far as I'm concerned. It really changes the dynamic of the act -- the ADVANCE Act changes the dynamic of the NRC really from a much more promotional dynamic.

I have one question, and I don't know this. I did not read the entire ADVANCE Act. I read portion of it. Does the ADVANCE Act provide additional funding for the NRC? If somebody -- Lance, if you could answer that, I'd appreciate it.

MR. RAKOVAN: Connie, I will admit that I have been narrowly focused on Section 506. And I really do not know the answer to that question. I apologize.

MS. KLINE: Okay. I think that's kind of a pivotal question. Is there anybody else that knows?

MR. RAKOVAN: If anyone on the NRC side of things wants to jump in and address that, feel free.

I do not know the answer to that at the top of my head.

MS. KLINE: You and I have corresponded in

75 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 past. And I appreciate your attention to my questions. If I put that in writing, can somebody research it and get back to me so I don't have to read the act word for word?

MR. RAKOVAN: Sure. If you'd like to send that to me, I'll see if I can get an answer back to you, Connie.

MS. KLINE: Okay. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

MR. RAKOVAN: Sure. Okay. I'm going to go to Kevin Kamps. And then I think we're going to go to a lightning, lightning round, if you will, and try to get through these last considerations in a fairly short amount of time if at all possible. Kevin Kamps, please.

MR. KAMPS: Thanks, yeah. One of the recent speakers just reminded me of an example of the NRC really betraying NEPA and the Atomic Energy Act actually even before the ADVANCE Act was passed. And this is in the context of the Fermi III new reactor proposal which thankfully we fought to a standstill.

Ground was never broken.

What the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did was changed its regulations to say that on the non-nuclear side of a nuclear power plant which, of

76 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 course, is an oxymoron, contradiction in terms to begin with, such as the transmission line corridor that would be needed for a new reactor of such a huge size as Fermi III that really the NRC didn't need to worry about NEPA compliance, environmental impact statement. Well, we did the detailed research. And this transmission line was going to go through forested wetland, including areas of endangered species habitat such as the eastern fox snake, for example, which only has four habitats on Lake Erie at all in the entire world.

And this major change in NRC environmental regulation, and we fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, we were denied certiorari. So it stood.

But thankfully, that transmission line corridor was never built. This was before the ADVANCE Act. I think what the ADVANCE Act represents is not advancement in any societal good like environmental protection.

It is a step back in time 50 to 70 years.

Some people may think that's a good thing to go back to the 1950s. Other people may disagree, especially in terms of environmental protection. Are you kidding me?

77 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 There were rivers on fire in this country back then. And so this is a bad idea, and we need to reverse it. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. So given that we are coming up on the end of our time, I just wanted to kind of whip through the other considerations. And then we'll kind of just have an open floor, if you will. So I'm going to try to move through these relatively quick, and then we'll take whatever input folks have on any of these.

So I'll just go through these quickly.

Consideration G, opportunities to streamline the Commission's analyses of alternatives, including the Commission's analysis of alternative sites and environmental reviews. So the focus of this one, if you're familiar with our environmental impact statements is that we go in depth on the alternatives to the proposed action. And so they're asking here to have a lighter touch or to streamline our analysis of alternatives.

H is establishing new categorical exclusions that could be applied to actions relating specifically to new applications. I, and this is a long one, is amending Section 51.20(b) of Title 10 CFR to allow the Commission to determine on a case

78 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 specific basis whether an environmental assessment rather than an environmental impact statement or supplemental environmental impact statement is appropriate for a particular application described in subsection A, again which is where all this direction is coming from, including proceedings in which the Commission relies on a generic environmental impact statement for advanced nuclear reactors. So again, this is looking at whether we could do an environmental assessment or an EA as opposed to an EIS or supplemental EIS.

J is authorizing the use of an applicant's environmental impact statement as the NRC's draft environmental impact statement. So this would just be essentially taking the input that the applicant provides us and using that as our draft EIS as opposed to the NRC creating a separate document. K is opportunities to adopt online and digital technologies including technologies that would allow applicants and cooperating agencies to upload documents and coordinate with the Commission to edit documents in real time.

And this is essentially a little bit different than a lot of the considerations that were being asked. And this is looking to leverage

79 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 technologies as opposed to pretty much all the other considerations are asked to embrace other documents or cooperation, et cetera.

And then L has a number of considerations involved with it. In addition to implementing the measures under paragraph 3, and again, that was potential revisions to Part 51 of 10 CFR and relevant Commission guidance documents to facilitate efficient, timely, and predictable environmental reviews of applications to assist decision making about relevant environmental issues. In addition implementing measures under paragraph 3, potential revisions to Part 51. So you could see this is just a lot of considerations that were -- specific considerations that were asked to be taken into account as part of this report as opposed to the wider categories of the previous ones.

And then I'll just go through real quick.

The last one is to -- we've been asked to include a schedule for any rulemaking that we might be doing as part of these efforts.

So I went through that really fast. But again, kind of wanted to put that out there and leave a little more time for hands. So I'm going to go ahead and go through the hands that I have here

80 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 starting with Pat Morita. Pat, you should be able to unmute.

MS. MORITA: Yes, hi. Thank you. So back to the streamlining. I'll say what I think is being streamlined and that is the length of time that the public gets to comment on NRC whenever you have a hearing or whatever. Now this hearing should be open for 10 or 12 hours1.388889e-4 days <br />0.00333 hours <br />1.984127e-5 weeks <br />4.566e-6 months <br /> to allow the public to come in from all over the country or whatever and talk about these things.

And how much attention do agencies have to pay to our input here? Well, I think a lot of it does depend on the amount of public that is out there screaming about things. We see it certainly affects Supreme Court decisions. So I'm sure that it would affect the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

But the idea that this is only a two-hour meeting and you have all these slides. So I have a question. Are we going to have access to see these slides? Because I can't go back and review them. And besides that, I don't want to take up everybody else's time that might want to be talking here about their concerns about how many things you just went through.

MR. RAKOVAN: So the slides can be accessed through our ADAMS system. The ascension

81 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 number, that's the number that starts ML here. You can also go to our public meeting schedule and find a link directly to -- I'm sorry. I misspoke. The slides are here at this ML24255A788.

You can also find all the information on this meeting, including a link to the slides on our public meeting schedule. You can go directly to that at NRC.gov. Or you can look for the meeting number here which is 20241112.

And again, we would be happy to take any written input that you provide us. But again, as noted, we don't have a lot of time to put this report together. So the sooner that you can get that input in, the better.

MS. MORITA: So who decides the length of time that we have to speak today?

MR. RAKOVAN: That was just a general decision made by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

We were not sure as to what kind of input and interest that we would have in this meeting. So we took a guesstimate of two hours. But again, this is just the first in a series of meetings that will involve the ADVANCE Act. So you can certainly expect that there will be more meetings posted to discuss these issues with the public and to receive public input as more

82 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 work is being done in our response to the ADVANCE Act.

PARTICIPANT: Well, you all are being paid here to do this. And so why not have a four-hour meeting and then you can close it if you don't have any more comments? But it seems like it's just someone -- it's always this way. It's always a very short amount of time.

And let's see. So well, another thing here too, I haven't seen a live person on this call.

So I'm looking at a screen of a bunch of numbers and stuff. So it's nice if you're at a hearing or whatever to be able to see people.

And last, I will say -- oh, okay. There we go. Thank you. So you talked about Biden knew what he was doing when he was signing it. And I say, yes, indeed he did because nuclear power is absolutely essential for keeping nuclear weapons being the public paying for them and then being upgraded and the whole idea of flaunting nuclear weapons and nuclear war and nuclear power is the front of that.

So I do think we really need to bear this into consideration the moral implications of war alone. Just the idea of humans organizing to fight wars around certain -- with certain leaders at the helm. And when we don't have any -- we have no

83 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 animosity towards the people of these various lands with each other.

So just -- I mean, we have come so far from human reality and all of this, looking at slides and all this stuff and getting people upset because they don't have enough information about what's really going on. So it's just -- the moral implications of this are huge. And I'll stop there.

MR. RAKOVAN: Okay. I'm going to go ahead and go to Michael McKean. Michael, you should be able to unmute and provide your comments. Again -- I'm sorry, Michael McLean. I misspoke. Michael McLean.

All right. Let me try one thing.

MR. McLEAN: Hey, can you hear me? Sorry, I was muted and now I can unmute myself.

MR. RAKOVAN: That's okay. Please proceed.

MR. McLEAN: Hi, so thank you to everyone from the NRC for hosting this. I'm Michael McLean.

I'm a nuclear energy advocate and I guess consumer who lives in Chicago.

Chicago, we're surrounded by ten nuclear reactors, powers 74 percent of all electricity that's generated for the city. And as long as I've been alive, that's been done safely thanks to a lot of the

84 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 work that NRC does overseeing the plants, ensuring, like, safety and operations. I'm here because I'm really concerned about the threat that climate change poses to the world and the impact it's going to have on my life and my family's life in the future.

And so I was really excited when I saw that there was a bipartisan consensus to support the development of new nuclear reactor technology and deploying, like, more licenses out there to deploy more nuclear plants.

I'd like to advocate specifically for more categorical exclusions for large reactors like the AP1000 to be developed specifically at existing nuclear plants. I think the Department of Energy has indicated that the most cost effective way to deploy new nuclear plants is by -- or new nuclear reactors is by deploying them at existing sites.

And I think that a large part of that is due to the fact that the large plants already have undergone a lot of the licensing processes and a lot of the environmental reviews that are necessary for operation. And so I'd just like to advocate for more categorical exclusions and ways to expedite the process of building new large reactors like the AP1000. I'm really excited about the opportunity in the future of those coming to my state, bringing more

85 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 federal money into the state, and developing economic opportunities in the local rural communities that are around the plants.

And it's carbon free energy which is great and it's reliable. It's going to be there in winter when our heat pumps are generating carbon free heat.

So it's really important for our future. So yeah, thank you so much for hosting this.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. Kevin Kamps.

Kevin, you should be able to provide your comment now.

MR. KAMPS: Yeah, I took Computers 101 in high school in, like, the early to mid-80s. And the cut and paste function already existed back then. So the ADVANCE Act suggesting that cutting and pasting by NRC of industry's own documents and calling them NRC documents is not an advancement by any means.

And it's also not an adequate or sufficient environmental review. I think that's a bad and dangerous idea. Burden was mentioned on one of those last slides that were flashed through.

Burden on who? On NRC and industry? What about the burden on the public, on our environment, our health, our safety, our security? What about the burden that we bear?

What about the burden of sovereign tribal

86 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 nations as was mentioned? There's a strange magnetic attraction between sovereign tribal nations and all things nuclear. It's really amazing.

Like, the radioactive waste dumps, they keep getting targeted. The radioactive waste dumps seem to keep getting targeted at sovereign tribal nations. It's really -- it's an interesting phenomenon, the same with iridium mining.

So burden on who? And boy, I'm really happy that there hasn't been a large scale nuclear catastrophe in the greater Chicago area. There are so many countless near misses. I'll just mention the one that comes to mind.

Dresden Nuclear Power Plant, Unit, 1, long shutdown, padlocked closed. A worker happened to walk through and happened to notice that the pool with the high level radioactive waste was draining because of one of those Chicago winter freezes that broke the pipe. So that was a version of catastrophe by sheer luck or define intervention I must say.

So that environmental risk which was also a health a safety risk got missed. The risk of a pipe on the spent nuclear fuel pool freezing and breaking and draining the pool. Thank God that worker saw that and action could be taken before. Chicago was wiped

87 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 off the map. I'm very thankful that's how it turned out.

MR. RAKOVAN: I'm going to go ahead and go to Michael Keegan. I think I booted him to the back of line unfortunately. So Michael, you should be able to unmute.

MR. KEEGAN: Thank you. Not the first time I've been booted to the back of the line, often for good reason. But this is not a streamlining.

This is an absolutely gutting of regulation, a gutting of NEPA.

And you're making a mockery of the whole process. And you're really trying to manufacture consent. Now we all agree this is the way to go, efficiency, streamlining. Now this is a gutting.

You're not doing your basic job which is to regulate. And when NRC staff have done regulation, the industry has been bullying them not to do it. So you're setting up a perfect storm.

You're going to reap what you have sown.

And the public is the only rudder on this ship of fools. And you're systematically locking out the public. And without a rudder, you're going to be circling the drain and there's going to be catastrophe upon catastrophe.

88 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 when the forensics are done and they want to know how did this possibly happen, your name is going to be there. So those are my comments.

Don't do it. Cancel this ADVANCE Act.

It was a ruse. It was done in the dead of night, unscrutinized. People did not what they were voting on. Attached to a three page bill, 90 pages, a wish list for industry. No, I don't think so.

Doesn't pass the smell test. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. I think I will

-- I might've lost my place a little bit. Kevin Kamps, did you have further comments?

MR. KAMPS: No, no. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Okay. Yeah, I thought I lost my place. Thank you. Jeff Merrifield, if you could, you should be able to unmute.

MR. MERRIFIELD: Thank you very much.

I've got a couple of comments. The first one is on your slide 18, you have a consideration, the opportunities to streamline the Commission's analysis of alternatives. One, I think, major inclusion in the environmental impact statement process has been the need to consider alternative sources of power.

And as I had articulated in front of the Commission staff previously, I really think that this

89 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 is an area where streamlining could be undertaken. In the current environment, you either have a situation where the person wants to build the plant is in a regulated state for which a public utility commission has made an evaluation whether that's appropriate or not. And so I do think that's a case where agency's actions to review was already undertaken by an economic regulator duplicative.

In an open market process, that entity which is (inaudible due to sound system failure) has made its own economic analysis about the best places to build or what form of energy used to meet the needs of the customers. And so I think in both of those circumstances, the amount of time and effort the agency has spent on alternative consideration of need for power is really not appropriate. Now I know some will say, well, are you considering other carbon free alternatives?

While there are others out there, what these users including many of the data center folks who have put enormous amount of time and effort into evaluating these have come to recognize that nuclear is really the only option for non-intermittent power for the kind of needs that those facilities have. Now recognizing that there's some people on the line who

90 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 would prefer that no nuclear power plants ever be built again, what I would note, I testified several times in front of Congress on the ADVANCE Act. I remember quite clearly a hearing in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee which has jurisdiction over these issues and which was involved in reviewing a variety of these pieces of legislation.

In that committee hearing, I would note that there was significant attendance by members of that House Energy and Commerce Committee. It was, I think, eye opening the degree of bipartisanship and support for deployment of nuclear energy generation.

In fact, I was somewhat surprised there was not a single voice in the 40-plus members of Congress that showed up that raised concerns that were very encouraging of this.

So despite some of the ad hominem comments made today and despite accusations that Congress didn't know what it's doing, the fact of the matter is that having them watching this process, I think Congress knew quite well what it was intending and wanted to make sure that the agency undertook efforts to streamline this process. At the same time, it does not take away the agency's mission to do that in a safe manner to make sure that these technologies are

91 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 appropriate. So I would just -- again, I want to credit the staff.

I know there have been a number of comments directed against them. I think they are doing a good job. And I thank you for your hard work.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. Let's go to Connie Kline.

MS. KLINE: Thank you again. Could you put up -- I'm not sure if it was Slide I or J. It was the one that talked about, excuse me, a consideration to authorize applicant's input as the draft EIS. Did I get that right? Wait a second.

MR. RAKOVAN: Yes, it's slide -- it's J.

You should see it now.

MS. KLINE: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My comment, this was would be seriously, this is akin to the wolves guarding the sheep. Any applicant has such a vested interest in the outcome of licensure.

I'm actually -- nothing shocks me when it comes to nuclear. But this surprises me greatly that this would even be a consideration. I wasn't even sure that I got the gist of it correctly as you were going kind of fast.

So my comment is that how can the NRC rely

92 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 on the applicant with its vested interest in the outcome using their environmental impact statement as a draft environmental impact statement. To me, this is a blatant example of a way that the NRC could shirk its responsibility. I'm not saying that the NRC wants to do that necessarily.

But this would be a perfect opportunity.

I can't emphasize enough that I'm surprised this is a consideration. But thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: Thank you. Ernie Kee.

Ernie.

MR. KEE: Hi. I just want to reiterate my concern that I hear that Congress is very carefully thinking about this streamlining. And I just want to reiterate that it's a fundamental consequence of reliability engineering. People know this very well.

The more opportunities you present for a problem to happen in an accident let's say, the more likely it is that one will occur. So it's not in the best interest of everyone. Industry, government, citizens to take our eye off the safety standards that have been well evolved over several decades and have served us so well.

I believe that we're on the right track.

It is true that nuclear power, even fission, is

93 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 probably the safest form of energy that we can put out, energy technology we can produce today at any scale. I think that the NRC's track record is unmatched in any other industry. And so again, I commend the NRC for what they have accomplished to date.

It's extraordinary. I think that while nuclear materials, radioactive materials, actinides and so forth may last for millions of years. That means that there's something that is around for a million years is probably very stable which means it's not very radioactive. And this is a fact that escapes many people.

Maybe it hasn't escaped Congress. It's maybe why they're advocating strongly for nuclear power. But it should be understood that for a short while, some of the early short lived radioactive materials will decay very rapidly and will produce a lot of radioactive energy in the environment. And they need to be managed.

But for millions of years, well, yes, that means they're basically stable and not causing any problems. That's why granite=s around for so long. I think another point that for environmental consideration is that nuclear power is very

94 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 sustainable.

The power that's generated in any commercial nuclear power plant today operating in the United States runs on fuel that was manufactured during operation, 94 percent roughly, of the energy that's being developed was made while the plant operated. And the radioactive material going back to that, if we would simply recycle our fuel, we could probably run for thousands of years without mining any more uranium or (inaudible). And that gets me to my final point which environmentally, nuclear is probably the best option we have.

It's very dense. So the footprint on the environment almost not compared to anything else we pick. And it produces the least atmospheric carbon dioxide of anything that we have available to us today.

And it produced very little waste, especially if we recycle. So coming full circle, the issue is safety. And I hope maybe the NRC can push Congress to say who's going to pay to make sure as we increase the size of the fleet, we increase the number of reactors which appears to me to be the objective of all of this.

Who's paying to have safety maintained?

95 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 I know that the prescriptive regulation is costly.

But it's also very -- been proved highly effective.

Okay. That's all I have to say. Thank you very much for this presentation that you've given.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Just want to remind folks that we're hoping to get comments on our congressional act or ADVANCE Act response. We look like we're 20-some minutes past our time. But we're going to go ahead and try to get through all the hands that we've received.

And hopefully, you all can provide us some good input. We've received quite a lot so far. But it looks like my next hand is Ernie Kee. Ernie, you should be able to unmute and provide your input.

MR. KEE: I'm sorry. I just spoke. So maybe I forgot to take my hand down.

MR. RAKOVAN: Oh, that's okay. That's all right. I'm sorry. Michael Keegan, I apologize. It's late and I'm starting to get a little fuzzy here.

MR. KEEGAN: Understood. A lot of moving parts. Thank you. Michael Keegan with Don't Waste Michigan. How do I get a transcription of this meeting or a recording of this meeting?

MR. RAKOVAN: So we are recording the meeting, and we will figure out a way to get the

96 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 recording posted in a manner that you'll be able to find it. The easiest way for us to do that is to put a link on the public meeting schedule page for this meeting. So that page will remain active, and you should be able to find it eventually once we figure out how to get this recording posted there.

MR. KEEGAN: Okay. And one more housekeeping thing. I only learned of this meeting last night -- yesterday as it got posted to ADAMS. I didn't see any previous notifications. Did those occur and could you site those documents for me?

MR. RAKOVAN: We spoke at a few previous meetings to get folks a heads up on this. I know we were talking with our office of public affairs about getting some stuff on social media. But I'm not sure that went out. So that is my -- that's my fault on that. If there wasn't a lot of publicity surrounding this meeting, that's on me and I apologize for that.

MR. KEEGAN: Well, that's a violation.

There's supposed to be a ten-day notice of the public

-- to the public of such a meeting of this importance.

So once again, procedurally in the dead of night attached to another bill, categorical, streamline, efficiency, all these euphemisms, all to skirt and divert regulation. So I'm deeply disappointed and

97 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 it's going to come back to bite you. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Kevin Kamps.

Kevin.

MR. KAMPS: Thanks. I just wanted to respond to former Commissioner Jeff Merrifield's comments a short time ago. If the ADVANCE Act was such a great idea, then why wasn't it introduced as a standalone bill? Why was it attached as a rider to another bill that was popular? I think some of what Jeff Merrifield said was --

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, please. We don't want to get into a back and forth.

MR. KAMPS: Well, sir, I'm making comments

-- I'm making comments on somebody else's --

MR. RAKOVAN: If you have a point that you'd like to make, please -- if you have a point that you'd like to make --

MR. KAMPS: Yeah, I'm trying to make it.

MR. RAKOVAN: -- please make it. But I'd prefer that you not attempt to -- because I don't want to get into a back and forth where other people now have to get on and don't believe that they have that say. This is not the place to do that.

MR. KAMPS: Well, let me just be more

98 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 general then.

MR. RAKOVAN: Please. I appreciate that.

MR. KAMPS: NEPA is a federal law that requires a hard look by federal agencies before a major federal action is taken. So not to name the name of a commenter who said that perhaps a regulated state with its public service commission could make these decisions or that others could make this decision besides the NRC which is going to approve a major federal action. This is a gutting of a NEPA.

This is a betrayal of NEPA. This is an undermining of NEPA. Obviously, it's not okay. But it's part of a pattern of attacking NEPA, a major federal environmental protection law.

And again, this is simply a return to the Atomic Energy Commission days of 50 to 70 years ago.

And it's not okay. It's going to harm the environment, public health, public safety, sovereign tribal nations.

And I think that a grain of salt should be attached to comments by people who are paid quite well to serve the industry at major law firms, at lobby firms, and other institutions that are best friends with the nuclear power industry. And the incentives and the motivations are questionable. It's not about

99 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 protecting the environment. I'll say that.

MR. RAKOVAN: All right. We're going to go Spenser (phonetic). I'm going to take the last three hands that I have. I'm finishing with Jackie.

And then we're going to move to close.

So I have Spenser, one name. You should be able to unmute. Spenser, are you with us? Let me try one more thing. Again, I have just a single name, Spenser. You should be able to unmute.

MR. NELSON: Okay, cool.

MR. RAKOVAN: There you go. Yes, please.

MR. NELSON: Yeah, sorry about that. Kind of confusing. First, I want to thank -- my name is Spenser Nelson (phonetic). I also live in Chicago and am super happy that most of my energy is provided from nuclear power.

I grew up about 45 minutes away from what we called Cordova but everybody else knows as the Quad City Power Facility. And it always provided wonderful jobs and clean, safe power to where I grew up. So I want to thank you guys for having this presentation, and I want to thank NRC for the streamlining of the environmental processes.

I really think that what's holding nuclear power back in a lot of ways is that there is a

100 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 regulatory burden on everything. I do recognize that a lot of people in this chat probably hid under desks in school when they were kids. But it is time for us to be not afraid of nuclear power.

Most of the accidents that happened weren't really accidents. And I really, really do commend the ADVANCE Act and the NRC for the streamlining of environmental processes and everything else it's doing. We need to be looking forward to the future and decarbonization. And the best and only way to do that is nuclear power. So thank you very much.

MR. RAKOVAN: Marty O'Neill. Marty, you should be able to unmute.

MR. O'NEILL: Yes, thank you. Marty O'Neill again, NEI. And I just wanted to underscore the fact that I think the title of the legislation says it all, the ADVANCE Act. I mean, Congress, the administration have made a policy determination.

They've determined that nuclear energy should be part of our -- a very important part of our energy mix moving forward. And they are seeking to streamline or make the process more efficient so that can become a reality. I don't think Congress or the Industry is asking the NRC to skew or circumvent its obligations under NEPA.

101 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 just want the agency to be well positioned, to conduct its licensing process including its NEPA reviews as efficiently as possible because we may very well see a large number of applications being submitted. And I did want to say again through bipartisan legislation, Congress did amend NEPA in 2023 through the Fiscal Responsibility Act. And a number of the provisions in the ADVANCE Act are fully consistent with what's in the revised NEPA as well as CEQ regulations. So I just wanted to emphasize those points. Thank you.

MR. REGAN: Lance, you're on mute.

MR. RAKOVAN: I knew that was going to happen one time or another. Jackie, 5837, you should be able -- there you go.

MS. DREXLER: Yes. Okay. Thank you so much. So first of all, I would just like to go back to what (inaudible) just said that most things that happen weren't really accidents. Well, they were accidents, and they were near misses as well which thank goodness were discovered by workers and by possible whistleblowers.

And thank goodness for people who were alert, workers on the ground. And part of the ADVANCE Act means there are not going to be as many workers on

102 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 ground. And that's a big issue.

I will just go back to say that like Michael Keegan and other people, I only found out about this last night. I can't even get onto your WebEx or whatever system you're using. I only use a phone. I can't see a thing.

And I tried to reach people today to get some help. I didn't get any help. I do appreciate that you've done this hearing and that you're extending now a bit beyond the time.

But I have to say that you have done an alphabet of things that we're supposed to be commenting on that I can't even see. I'm going to go back to maybe it was D, maybe it was F, the streamlining the analysis of alternatives and EIS reviews. And I'm not sure who was speaking.

It may have been Lance who said we're looking for the lighter touch on alternatives. Well, I believe that there needs to be a huge environmental

-- an economic analysis of what the alternatives are because we all know that the nuclear energy is going to take a very long time to get up. And it's going to cost billions and billions of dollars.

And I do believe that there are actually lighter touch alternatives available to us right at

103 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 moment. But let me go on to say that I think now what I got very upset at is J which is allowing the use of the applicant's information EIS instead of the NRC actually kind of creating their own separate because as -- maybe it was Connie Kline who said that's the fox in the henhouse or whatever the expression is. I've seen so many applications where people have lied on their applications.

They're not complete applications, and they were passed through anyhow. And this is the real issue. I'd also like to comment on No. K on online and digital technology to be able to coordinate with agencies in real time.

Well, that's great for all of you. But what about us, the public? How is the public going to be having access to that? I didn't even have access to this meeting.

So how is the public going to be having access to that? And then I would like to also say that regarding a schedule for rulemaking, I would like to have a schedule for these meetings. You're saying it's the first in a series of meetings.

I would like that schedule to be actually emailed to me so I can put it on to my calendar with the appropriate way to get onto the meeting so that

104 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'm not doing this at the last second. I just (inaudible). There was just no outreach here that you're throwing this huge amount of stuff at us.

And we don't even know when the other meetings will be or if it's just going to be one or two or three. I'd also like to say that a fellow is talking about how he was concerned -- well, he said he lived in Chicago and there's nuclear reactors. And we have to stop being concerned about threats.

Okay. Well, my concern is that we're changing these regulations and streamlining. There'll be a lack of NRC oversight actually. And I am hugely concerned about the threats that Holtec has and will continue to have over our lives.

This is a major threat. This is a company that is getting their hands into every nuclear reactor site for either decommissioning or repurposing or reopening. And this company is a big threat to all of us.

And I feel that the NRC is maybe being pushed -- having it slightly pushed by Holtec and is

-- well, you know, I think having Kevin Kamps started out this whole comment period by saying that there was collusion between operators and the NRC and the government. And it's a blueprint for disaster. And

105 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 actual dictionary definition of the word collusion means playing together nicely.

And I think that's what's going on here.

So I'm very, very concerned. And I'm concerned. I feel that the policy -- to have policies without enough checks and balances and guardrails is a very, very dangerous situation. Thank you very much.

MR. RAKOVAN: I've got one last hand that we're going to go to before we move to close. Jeff Merrifield, go ahead, please.

MR. MERRIFIELD: Once again, I want to thank the staff for their patience in listening to the comments today. I would say two things. First, I think I agree with Marty O'Neill's interpretation that both the changes to -- prior changes to NEPA and the guidance of CEQ is consistent with a number of things that the staff is considering in responding to the requirements of the ADVANCE Act.

And there is substantial flexibility built within NEPA for the agency to make determinations of the content of the EIS should consider. The following I would say is I think everyone on the call deserves a right to be heard. And everyone on the call deserves and has a right not to have attacks directed against them or have questions regarding their motivation

106 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 brought out in an ad hominem fashion. And I just appreciate the efforts of the staff to make sure as we go forward with more of these meetings that it can be done in a way that is respectful to all individuals involved. Thank you.

MR. RAKOVAN: So a couple things before I turn it over to Chris. Our next steps, we will be issuing a meeting summary and posting the recording of this meeting so that you can find it. We're going to analyze the input and consider that as we work on our report to Congress.

And again, our report is due the first week of January. So if you give me a second, I want to show you something that was just posted today. Let me show a different screen.

Okay. So hopefully you can see this.

This is our public meeting schedule which you can find at NRC.gov if you go to public involvement and go to our public meeting schedule. If you go down here to the 16th of October, a meeting was just posted. You can press here that says More.

And this is a new public meeting that will be coming up on the 16th. The purpose of the meeting is to provide an overview of the actions underway at the NRC to implement the ADVANCE Act and obtain

107 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 feedback on its efforts from stakeholders. So that is going to be the 16th of October.

Again, that looks like that starts at 9:30 a.m. And you can find the information here on our public meeting schedule. Again, that is October 16th at 9:30 a.m. Eastern. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn things over to Chris to close the meeting for us. Chris, if you would.

MR. REGAN: Yeah, thanks, Lance. I very much appreciate all the input and the comments provided by those that joined us today. It was good to see a healthy representation across the full demographics of the public and interested stakeholders in our activities on the ADVANCE Act and specifically on this section of the act.

It is as Lance mentioned at the beginning only one section of many. So we are focusing our energies on this one. Our report to Congress in January is the first of many activities that we will be undertaking to implement the ADVANCE Act as we move forward.

Thank

you, Lance, for sharing the specifics on the next meeting that's scheduled for the agency on the ADVANCE Act. I'd urge you all if you are interested in continuing to engage with the NRC

108 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 provide your input, there will likely be several other meetings that are going to occur on other sections to the ADVANCE Act. So please keep an eye out for those.

This is your kind of heads up that there will be more coming. So I urge you to keep an eye open for these and reference to the NRC's public website as often as you can. Lance, I'd like to commend you for your patience and diligence in facilitating the meeting.

Thank you very much for walking us through the act and facilitating the comments from the members of the public. And with that, I think we have finished what we needed to get through today. And with that, I'd like to adjourn the meeting. Thank you, everybody.

(Whereupon, the above-entitled matter went off the record.)