ML24150A326
| ML24150A326 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Monticello  |
| Issue date: | 05/15/2024 |
| From: | NRC/NMSS/DREFS/ELRB |
| To: | |
| References | |
| NRC-2812 | |
| Download: ML24150A326 (55) | |
Text
Official Transcript of Proceedings
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
Title:
Draft Environmental Impact Statement Meeting Related to the Monticello Power Plant License Renewal Application
Docket Number: (n/a)
Location: Monticello, Minnesota
Date: Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Work Order No.: NRC-2812 Pages 1-54
NEAL R. GROSS AND CO., INC.
Court Reporters and Transcribers 1716 14th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20009 (202) 234-4433 1
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
+ + + + +
DRAFT ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT MEETING RELATED
TO THE MONTICELLO POWER PLANT LICENSE RENEWAL
APPLICATION
+ + + + +
WEDNESDAY,
MAY 15, 2024
+ + + + +
The meeting was convened at the Monticello
Community Center, 505 Walnut Street, Monticello,
Minnesota, at 6:00 p.m., Brett Klukan, Facilitator,
presiding.
PRESENT:
BRETT KLUKAN, Facilitator
STEVE KOENICK, Branch Chief, Environmental Project
Management Branch 1, Office of Nuclear Material
Safety and Safeguards, Division of Rulemaking,
Environmental, and Financial Support, NRC
JESSICA UMANA, Environmental Review Lead, Office of
Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, NRC
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ALSO PRESENT:
GEORGE CROCKER, North American Water Office
ROGER CUTHBERTSON
LEA FOUSHEE, North American Water Office
SUSAN JEFFERY
JOHN LAFORGE, Nukewatch
RACHEL LEONARD, Administrator, City of Monticello
KELLY LUNDEEN, Nukewatch
DAVID LUCE
LINDSAY POTTER
JO SCHUBERT
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T-A-B-L-E O-F C-O-N-T-E-N-T-S
Page
Opening Remarks.....................................
Introduction and Purpose............................
Environmental Impact Statement Preliminary Findings.
Public Questions and Presentation...................
Public Comments on the Environmental Impact Statement
Adjourn.............................................
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P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S
6:00 p.m.
MR. KLUKAN: Okay, so again, welcome
everyone this evening to the NRC's preliminary findings
meeting for the environmental review for the Monticello
Nuclear Power Plant, a nuclear generating plant with
one subsequent license renewal proceeding.
Again, my name is Brett Klukan. It is my
pleasure to facilitate this evening's meeting, hosted
by the NRC. My colleague Jessica Umana will be on the
meeting presenting tonight.
Our goal this evening is twofold. One,
to provide you with an overview of the NRC's preliminary
findings in our draft License Renewal Environmental
Impact Statement, and what you'll hear is Draft EIS
or DEIS. And second, to solicit your comments on the
Draft EIS.
Okay, here's our agenda for this evening.
After some opening remarks and several introductions,
we will move on to a brief presentation involving the
preliminary findings of the Draft EIS and our associated
processes. We'll then take a short time to see if
anyone has any clarifying questions on the
presentation, like how do I offer additional comments
again, what are the mechanisms for doing so, where can
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I get a copy of the DEIS and whatnot. After that, the
final and most important part of the meeting this
evening, we will open the floor to your comments on
the DEIS.
So on this slide we have the two of our
interesting speakers, their names and titles. And
again, we have Jessica Umana, who is the Environmental
Review Lead in the Office of Nuclear Material Safety
and Safeguards. And we have Steve Koenick, who is the
Branch Chief of the Environmental Project Branch 1 in
the same office, the Office of Nuclear Material Safety
and Safeguards, in the Division of Rulemaking,
Environmental, and Financial Support.
So this is a comment-gathering meeting,
which means that our primary purpose this evening is
to listen to you. Specifically, to gather your
comments on the draft Environmental Impact Statement.
So we appreciate your patience of hearing out our
presentation. We want to make sure that everyone who's
joining us this evening has at least a basic
understanding of that document, of the structure of
that document, as well as the associated processes for
how we move forward with the NRC review.
Please know that we are transcribing
tonight's meeting, so I would ask that when it is your
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turn to speak, will you please state your name for the
benefit of our transcriptionist, as well as any
organizational affiliation you would like to have
captured. As we meet here, no regulatory decisions
will be made at tonight's meeting.
Now for some basic ground rules. I ask
that you please adhere to civil decorum, excuse me.
Out of respect for each other, don't just rob the
speaking times of others just as you wouldn't want to
be interrupted yourself. However, I want to make this
very clear, and hopefully this will not be an issue
this evening, but under no circumstances will
threatening or gestures or statements be tolerated,
and any such statements or gestures will be cause for
the ejection from the meeting this evening. If you
feel that you are threatened in any way, please come
speak to me or one of the other administrative staff
to communicate prompt and immediate action.
Now, if you something that you'd like to
give to the NRC staff, please hand it to me. I got
some and whatnot and we already got them out ourselves.
So, but as try to stay, if you will, in the carpeted
area. Now without further ado, I'd like to turn it
over to Steve.
MR. KOENICK: Thank you, Brett. And good
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evening, everyone. My name, as Brett mentioned, is
Steven Koenick, and I am the Environmental Project
Management Branch 1 Branch Chief of our Center of
Expertise at the U.S. Regulatory Commission. And I'd
like to welcome everyone to tonight's meeting. This
is our second public meeting on the Draft Environmental
Impact Statement, or GEIS for the Monticello Nuclear
Generating Plant Station subsequent license renewal.
So as Brett mentioned, today's purpose is
for us to present our findings and to hear from you
on comments for the Draft Environmental Impact
Statement. Before we begin today's presentation, I'd
like to briefly introduce the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission to you and its mission. The NRC regulates
commercial nuclear power, fuel cycle, research test
reactors, and general use of radioactive material in
a medical and industrial, and educational settings.
The NRC was formed in 1974, following the
Energy Reorganization Act, which basically split the
Atomic Energy Commission into an independent regulatory
entity, the NRC, and what is now the Department of
Energy, which does the promotional aspects of nuclear
technology. I included the strategic plan from 2022
to 2026. There's a QR code there and the plan provides,
sets out three strategic goals as the key to the agency
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successfully fulfilling its mission.
The first one is to ensure the safe and
secure use of radioactive materials. The second goal
is to continue to foster a healthy organization, and
the third goal is to inspire stakeholder confidence
in the NRC. For the third goal, stakeholder
confidence, we use meetings like this to engage with
members of the public regarding how we conduct our
processes.
I would like to take a moment to address
in terms of stakeholder confidence, I would like to
take a moment to address and clarify some
miscommunication regarding the presence of detectable
tritium in the Mississippi River. I know we had
meetings in which we reported there were no indications
of tritium leak made into the Mississippi. However,
as you have looked in our Draft Environmental Impact
Statement, we do conclude that there were some very
low concentrations of tritium in the Mississippi River.
These concentrations were very low, well below the
required detection levels, leading to the
misrepresentation that the tritium was not detected
in the Mississippi.
So we apologize for this miscommunication.
It is important to note that we continue to conclude
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that the public remains safe, that the detected level
of tritium were extremely low. The levels were so low
that they would not impact accepted drinking water
standards for the local community or the Minneapolis
area.
Furthermore, the staff at XCel's review
of this issue is ongoing. Nonetheless, we are
reviewing our internal processes to prevent these types
of miscommunication in the future. And we will be
available after this meeting to discuss in more detail
if you have any questions. I look forward to hearing
your insights and feedback on the Monticello's DEIS,
and thank you in advance for your participation.
With that, I will turn the presentation
over to Jessica.
MS. UMANA: Hello everyone. Welcome, and
thank you for taking time this evening to join us.
The time is very much appreciated. So we're just going
to jump right into it.
I'm going to start with this slide with
some background information on Monticello. Monticello
is a single unit electric generating plant consisting
of a General Electric Boiling Water Reactor. The NRC
issued the original license in September 8, 1970, and
was granted an initial renewed license in 2006. The
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current renewed license expires in September 2030, and
if the renew license is granted, we are looking at a
20-year period of re-licensing for the plant.
Onto our environmental review. In terms
of our environmental review, we have a Generic
Environmental Impact Statement or a GEIS, which
addresses environmental issues that are common to all
plants or a distinct subset of plants. Previous
reviews for subsequent license renewal used the GEIS
to take a softer look at generic topics while a deeper
dive into Category 2, or what we call site-specific
issues, was conducted. That all changed with the
issuance of Commission Orders in 2022. So what we've
done is created a site-specific environmental impact
statement for Monticello, which does a full assessment
of all Category 1 or generic issues, in Category 2
site-specific issues.
Last week at the virtual meeting for those
that were there, I misspoke, so I do want to capture
this on the record as a correction. What you'll see
here in this Draft Environmental Impact Statement is
a full evaluation of all generic and site-specific
issues. Last week I mentioned that the Draft EIS was
the full evaluation of all site-specific issues only.
However, since this is a subsequent license renewal,
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we have to look at both generic and site-specific
issues.
Here's a nice graphic to entertain you.
So this graphic here just shows you some of the resource
areas that we take into consideration in our
environmental review. So we do look at things like
surface and ground water, use and quality, radiation
protection and postulated accidents, air quality and
meteorology.
Now as to how impacts are defined. The
NRC characterizes potential impacts according to levels
of significance for potential impacts, Small, Moderate
or Large. A Small impact would be defined as effects
that are not detectable or are so minor that they will
neither destabilize nor noticeably alter any important
attribute of the resource. A Moderate impact is
defined as effects are sufficient to alter noticeably,
but not to destabilize important attributes of a
resource. And finally, large impacts indicate that
the environmental effects are clearly noticeable and
are sufficient to destabilize important attributes of
the resource.
We do have some special resource areas that
don't follow along with the categorization of small,
moderate or large. So for federally listed species
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in critical habitats, we use the language of the
Endangered Species Act, which again is similar in that
it has three category definitions for impacts: no
effect, may affect but not likely to adversely affect,
or may affect in a slight to adverse effect. So again,
three categories.
For essential fish habitat, we use the
language of the Magnuson Stevens Act, which in this
case has four categorical definitions for impacts.
And those are no adverse impacts; minimal adverse
impacts; more than minimal, but less than substantial
adverse effects; and substantial adverse impact.
The impacts on historic and cultural
resource use the language of the National Historic
Preservation Act to define impacts as either there would
be no adverse effect or there would be an adverse effect.
And then for Environmental Justice, we use the language
of Executive Order 12898 to make a determination whether
its impacts, if any, have high and adverse human health
or environmental effects on minority and low-income
populations.
Now to move on to the Draft EIS preliminary
findings. This slide shows the list of resource areas
where the impact was determined to be small. You can
see that they include air quality and noise, terrestrial
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and aquatic resources, socioeconomics, waste
management and so on. For the most part, we found that
the impacts on various resource areas due to the 20
additional years of operation of Monticello, we would
estimate as being small in the environment.
Going on to other topics that use different
categorizations, the ones that we covered just a few
minutes ago, we see that for historic and cultural
resources, our preliminary finding is that subsequent
license renewal would not adversely affect known
historic properties. For environmental justice there
are no disproportionately high and adverse human health
and environmental effects on minority and low-income
populations as a result of the proposed action.
For cumulative impacts, this one is a
little bit more complicated, so we don't necessarily
slap a single, or have categorical definitions for this.
We do ask that you go ahead and look at Section 3.15
in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement if you're
interested specifically in cumulative impacts, which
considers the continued operation of the plant, along
with operation of other things going on around the
plant.
Now for ground water impacts, we look at
several environmental issues, four actually, and those
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are contamination in use, specifically non-cooling
system impact. Use-complex for a plant that withdraw
more than 100 gallons per minute, use-complex for plants
with closed-cycle cooling systems that withdraw makeup
water from a river, and lastly, radionuclides released
to the ground water. All of these environmental issues
related to ground water have a small impact, with the
exception of the last one, which we found to be small
to moderate. Again, this is a correction I wanted to
make from last week's presentation where I said all
ground water environmental issues were small.
For special species status and habitats,
we have a preliminary finding that the proposed action
may affect, but is not likely to adversely affect the
critters that you see listed here: the Northern
long-eared bat, the tri-colored bat, the whooping crane
and the Monarch butterfly. No effect is seen on
designated critical habitats or essential fish
habitats. Our National Marine Sanctuary is present.
For alternatives, we find no new and significant
information identified regarding the following
alternatives in which power replacement includes
natural gas and renewables, renewables in storage and
new nuclear. And also, all these evaluations require
that we look at the No Action alternative as well.
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This brings us to our preliminary
recommendation. Based on its evaluation of
environmental impacts, the NRC staff preliminary
recommendation is the adverse environmental impacts
of Monticello's subsequent license renewal are not so
great that preserving the option of subsequent license
renewal for energy planning decision makers would be
unreasonable. That's a mouthful. So in short terms,
the analysis that the staff performed, we concluded
that there's not an environmental reason for
energy-planner decisions to not allow the plant to
operate for an additional 20 years.
Given the impacts on the environment, we
don't see it great enough that we would say hey, you
need to shut down the plant. Again the NRC has no role
in energy-planning decisions of utility officials or
state regulators as to whether a nuclear power plant
should continue to operate. We can only provide the
analysis of the environmental impact, and we make
recommendation as to whether the decision-makers should
take the option to continue to operate the plant off
the table.
These are some environmental review
milestones. Another clarification that I wanted to
provide from last week's meeting is initially we were
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not sure if we were going to hold a public meeting to
get your comments on the draft, and we didn't want to
put a date out there until we were close to draft
publication to make sure that the 45-day comment period
we gave was close to that date. So I do apologize for
that.
To cover some of our review milestones,
a comment period for the Draft Environmental Impact
Statement started on April 19th with the publication
of a federal registered notice by the EPA. The draft
is published by the NRC's federal register on April
24th, with our comment period closing 45 days from the
NRC's publication date, which is June 10th. If you
provide your comments after that date, we will do our
best to include your comments as we deliberate and work
towards the final environmental impact statement, but
we can't guarantee that we will accept your comments
and process them after the 10th. So please try to get
your comments in by the 10th. Our goal is to issue
the Environmental Impact Statement by October this
year.
If you would like to have a copy of the
Draft Environmental Impact Statement, I think I have
like three more copies. It's a bestseller so please
grab one. So I think some of you took copies already.
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I also was able to drop off two copies at the library
across the street. So they are in the reference section
back there. If you wish to see an electronic version,
we have the link up there, and I do believe the QR code
also directs them to that. If you need a card we have
some on the table outside. And again, if you would
like to go to our Agency Document Access and Management
System, take note of the ML number here, and then you
can also read the Environmental Impact Statement there.
For additional information on the project,
we do have a project website dedicated to Monticello,
and that's at the link up here. There you can see the
subsequent license renewal application, the
environmental report, the current schedule, and the
safety and environmental project manager information
associated with Monticello. You can also sign up for
the Listserv at the link provided here in the last
bullet, if you like.
Okay, submitting comments. You can do it
the old school method and try snail mail, or you can
go to regulations.gov and use Docket ID NRC-2023-0031,
and submit your comment through there. Or you can email
our resource mailbox at Monticello Environmental at
NRC.gov. And again, remember that your comment should
try to come in by June 10th. Last week we heard that
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June 10th is not enough time to get your comments
together, so if you'd like to request an extension,
please take note of my email, that's
jessica.umana@nrc.gov.
Now we're going to move into the question
portion of this, if there are any questions on the
presentation. I'm going to hand it back over to Brett.
MR. KLUKAN: Okay, so without any further
delay, does anyone have any clarifying questions on
the presentation or any of the materials or statements
you heard tonight that from either Steve or Jess? If
you do, please come up. The microphone is on.
MR. CUTHBERTSON: I have a question for
Jessica Umana, about the regulator. I was just
wondering, how can waste management impact be judged
to be small, when the monitoring of the waste is going
to have to go on for thousands of years. How can we
say at this present point in time that the impact of
Monticello's waste management is small when the jury
is not out yet? We won't know how small it is until
for the next, you know, this is going to be ages for
thousands of years.
MR. KLUKAN: Could you state your name for
the record?
MR. CUTHBERTSON: I'm Roger Cuthbertson.
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MS. UMANA: Hi Roger, thank you so much
for the question. Unfortunately, I don't have my
subject matter expert here who fit the analysis in an
environmental statement, but your comment is being
captured by our transcriber so we will be able to provide
a response to you.
MR. KLUKAN: Does anyone else have a fair
amount of questions they'd like to ask at this time?
All right, there are none. We'll now for - I saw a
hand. Would you like to make it from a microphone.
MS. JEFFERY: I don't need a microphone.
What are you gonna do with the waste?
MR. KLUKAN: Okay. So, what again,
Jessica has mentioned, we don't have the subject matter
expertise here to answer your substantive questions.
As you can see, the DEIS is very long and contains
a wide variety of comments. Roger and Danica are here.
Excuse me, Jessica and Steve are here this evening
to go over the general here's what the NRC does, here's
how its process works. But what we'll do is capture
that. Again, it's part of transcript as a comment on
the DEIS.
What was your name? Just so - the reason
for the microphone is there's a series of other
microphones up here as well to make sure we can capture
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that. But what was your name again?
MS. JEFFERY: Susan Jeffery.
MR. KLUKAN: Susan Jeffery.
MS. JEFFERY: Yeah.
MR. KLUKAN: All right, great. So we'll
capture that as a comment on your behalf, as part of
our meeting. Any other clarifying questions? Okay.
I'd like now to move into any elected
officials or representatives of any tribe nations at
this time, and then we'll get to federal. Any
representatives of a tribal nation prepared to offer
anything at this time? All right.
Okay, I know we have a representative from
the City of Monticello here.
MS. LEONARD: Good evening, my name is
Rachel Leonard. I'm the city administrator for the
City of Monticello. I'm here to speak in support of
the subsequent re-licensing of the Monticello nuclear
generating plant on the condition that we continue to
monitor the environmental impacts of, and I know that
is being done in relation to the tritium water leak
in 2023.
XCel's power plant is an influential part
of our community and there are significant benefits
if Monticello is to have its license extended for an
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additional 20 years. The station provides a host of
stable living wage jobs. It makes substantial
contributions to our tax based, is a driver of economic
vitality in the company, is civically engaged in a
variety of initiatives and assistance for the city.
We also understand the critical importance
of nuclear power, as XCel Energy and the state of
Minnesota strive to achieve their clean energy goals,
and we believe the continued operation of the plant
is a key component of the responsible strategy to
maintain electrical capacity as well as resiliency
across the grid. We thank you for your thorough review
of the plant and the potential environmental impacts.
And I thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight
in support of allowing the plant to operate responsibly
for an additional 20 years. Thank you.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much. Are
there any other presiding officials or representatives
at this time.
Okay, moving now to the public comment
portion of the meeting. So that's a 30 - want to give
like five minutes for this song? Does that sound about
right? How long is the song? Give me an estimate.
MR. CUTHBERTSON: Three and a half
minutes.
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MR. KLUKAN: Three and a half -- so then
I'm going to pack all the public comments at the end
by 7:15, okay? Okay, so then I have ten people on here
to do that. So that gives us about a little over an
hour. So try to keep your comments beneath six minutes.
I'll give you a one-minute warning. I don't want to
cut off anybody. That's not why I came out here
tonight. But you know, out of respect for everybody
so they get equal chance at the microphone, please try
to keep yourself to six minutes. And now again, without
any further delay, let us start with Jo Schubert.
Again, if you need the microphone brought to you, please
let me know. Otherwise, please use the podium. And
again, start with your name and any affiliation.
MS. SCHUBERT: Hi, I'm Jo Schubert. And
I want to thank you for having this hearing. This is
research by Steven Starr, director of the Clinical
Library Science Program at the University of Missouri,
and this is from his work entitled The Comparison of
Japan with Radioactive Cesium, The Banana Comparison.
Radioactive waste producers like NSP and
XCel and others often compare the radioactive waste
that they produce with naturally occurring elements
like the potassium 40 found in bananas. This is
deliberately confusing disinformation, which is used
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to make the impression that ingesting or breathing
radioactive emissions from reactors is normal and
harmless. This is false. Most naturally occurring
radioactive elements commonly found in earth's crust
are very weakly radioactive.
Potassium 40 in bananas, has an extremely
weak radioactive specific activity, 7 millions of one
curie per gram. Tritium, on the other hand, has a
specific activity of 9,800 curies per gram. In other
words, tritium is 1.3 billion times as radioactive as
Potassium 40. Which one would you rather have in your
bananas or your drinking water? Thank you.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much. Next
we have Raymond Campos.
MR. CAMPOS: Can I go at the end?
MR. KLUKAN: Sure, okay, so we'll circle
back to you. Next we have, and again, I apologize if
I'm mispronouncing anyone. I think it's Dan LaForge?
John.
MR. LAFORGE: Poor handwriting. My name
is John LaForge. I'm a staff person with Luke Watch
in northwest Wisconsin. The Draft Environmental
Impact Statement trivializes Monticello's major recent
radioactive leak, which has poisoned the Mississippi
and tarnished XCel's public image.
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The 829,000 gallon leak of reactive cooling
water highly contaminated with radioactive tritium,
xenon and iodine, endangers 3.7 million people in the
Minneapolis St. Paul metro area, and another 20 million
people downstream who rely on the Mississippi River
for drinking water. During water is the principal
matter of fact regarding Monticello's environmental
impact. Yet the draft Environmental Impact Statement
only notes that the Minneapolis Intake Water Works are
37 miles downstream.
The leak occurred from late 2022 through
early 2023, and created a plume of radioactive ground
water, which according to the draft Environmental
Impact Statement, quote, likely discharged to the
river, end quote. The concentration of tritium in the
leak was 250 times what's allowed in drinking water
by the Environmental Protection Agency. Tritium
permanently contaminates gigantic volumes of water that
it comes in contact with, and it stays in the environment
for 123 years or ten radioactive half-lives.
On March 18, 2023, NSC spokesperson
Victoria Mitland told the press, quote, there is no
pathway for the tritium to get into drinking water,
end quote. But XCel's own annual Radioactive Effluent
Release Report says, quote, there are several
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mechanisms that can result in doses to the public,
including ingestion of radionuclides in water, end
quote. Mitland's public relations fib was committed
one year before the NSC's own DEIS concluded, and I
quote, tritium impacted ground water likely discharged
to the river, end quote.
Chris Clark, XCel's president, told the
Associated Press, quote, even if the tritium reached
the river, which Clark assured wouldn't happen, it would
dissipate within a few yards, end quote. This is twice
untrue. Saying that tritium would not reach the river
was false, and the word dissipate means to disappear.
While XCel knows full well that tritium persists in
the environment for over a century. The treatment
contamination becomes diluted in the river, but all
the tritium itself stays there as it moves downstream.
Consuming tritium, ingesting tritium, even
in trace amounts, is not safe. Tritium crosses the
placenta. Tritium can cause problem pregnancies and
tritium can cause birth abnormalities. It's common
knowledge that the harmful effects of radiation are
particularly dangerous to women, girls and infants and
fetuses.
At the May 8 public hearing here in this
building, the NRC's Jason Reed said, and this is a quote,
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even if the whole leak had gone into the Mississippi,
it wouldn't create a health threat, end quote. This
shocking dishonesty is debunked by the NRC's own online
fact sheet titled Radiation Exposure and Cancer, which
says, quote, any amount of radiation may pose some risk
for causing cancer and hereditary effect. Any increase
in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental
increase in risk, end quote.
XCel kept from notifying the public about
this leak for four months while it submitted its
application for the extended license. All this
dishonesty and secrecy are good reasons for the public's
loss of faith in XCel's operation of the reactor and
in the ability of the NSC to do any regulation. The
NRC's draft Environmental Impact Statement makes the
bogus claim that climate change impacts, quote, on
future reactor operations projected in the renewal
period are outside the scope of a license renewal
environmental review, end quote.
This is contrary to the recommendations
of a government accounting office report, which was
requested by Congress, both to assess and to increase
the resiliency of reactor operations in the face of
climate change. The key AO report to Congress is
titled, quote, Nuclear Power Plants: NRC Should Take
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Action to Fully Consider the Potential Impacts of
Climate Change, end quote. Moreover, ignoring climate
change threats is a violation of the National
Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. NEPA requires that
the NRC take a, quote-unquote, hard look at
environmental impacts whenever taking major federal
actions and decision making that involve the public
and due process.
The NRC's neglect of climate change in the
draft Environmental Impact Statement is an unlawful
attempt to circumvent these NEPA requirements. The
NRC staff had two years to update its license renewal,
environmental review process under the NRC commission
orders of February 24, 2022. All it did in these two
years was come up with the claim in the draft
Environmental Impact Statement that the current
licensing basis is robust enough to sufficiently
address anything climate could throw at Monticello.
The basis wasn't robust enough then. It certainly
isn't now, given an accelerated climate crisis.
The new information which the NRC says it
must take into consideration, could well be an
overwhelming climate-driven severe weather event.
Wildfires, for example, or flooding of the Mississippi,
heating up the river water that makes it unsuitable
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for cooling. Such events may occur too abruptly for
any mitigation action. That plan needs to happen in
advance and should have been part of the draft
Environmental Impact Statement. The public deserves
to know exactly when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
staff will formally answer the government accounting
office's report's findings and recommendations. Thank
you.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you for your comment.
Next we have Susan Jeffery.
MS. JEFFERY: I'm Susan Jeffery. My first
point is that we don't trust you. We do not trust NRC,
NSP, XCel, no matter what you call yourselves, you're
hiding behind tritiated water, which I drink, along
with, what, 20 million other people. We can't trust
you because you don't tell the truth or you hide your
facts.
In other countries this would be called
corruption, but we don't call it corruption. In
America we call it business as usual. Monticello is
way, way past its due date. It's beyond pregnant.
It's carrying death. It's a zombie nuke, it's the
undead, it will never die because radioactivity lives
pretty much forever.
In this area around the Twin Cities, we
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have a triple threat. Two nuclear power plants from
Prairie Island and one from Monticello. But
Monticello's not just another nuke. It's a Fukushima
nuke. It just seems that money is more important than
life, and that's too bad.
As I asked before, what are you going to
do with the waste? I used to be a newspaper reporter
at Cape Canaveral, and that was one of the most popular
questions. Can't you shoot it up into space? The
answer is no. There's too much of it, it weighs too
much, and if there's an accident it will nuclify pretty
much the east coast of the United States.
So just to reiterate, we don't trust you.
You don't tell the truth. You're way past your due
date. You're not doing anything about it except
looking for more profits. We've got a triple threat,
we've got a Fukushima type nuke on top of the Twin
Cities. It's dangerous, it's irreversible, and you
must stop it. There's no excuse to continue this.
We have all kinds of other power sources. We need to
grow up and be sure about the future because if not
we're going to eat up the future.
So thanks for your time. Please take into
consideration the comments about trust and about the
future, and do something other than count your money.
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MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much for your
comments. Next we will turn to Lea Foushee. Again,
I apologize for any mispronunciation.
MS. FOUSHEE: I've heard it all my life.
I'm Lea Foushee. I'm the environmental justice
director of the North American Water Office. And I'm
here today to ask you, what's your plan if Monticello
goes down? You have a terrorist threat, they could
take it out, and they would take out Minneapolis right
along with it because our water intake for Minneapolis
is at Fridley, 37 miles away from here. Minneapolis
has no wells. There would be no water except
radioactive water that would do nothing but kill and
maim and harm every living thing.
So what's your plan? What's your plan for
water? Water for life? You don't have any, do you?
You have no water for life. You only have water for
death. And more death. And I pity you.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you for your comments.
Next we'll move to George Crocker. George Crocker?
MR. CROCKER: My name is George Crocker.
I'm the executive director of the North American Water
Office. I have been dealing with the NRC since the
mid-80s. And at that time it became quite clear what
your mission is. You are enablers. You enable
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reckless death. Institutionalized reckless
endangerment. It's what you do, and that is
disgusting.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you for your comments.
Next we will turn to Roger -- I know you said your
name already. Cuthbertson?
MR. CUTHBERTSON: Hi, you got that pretty
close. My name is Roger Cuthbertson. Thanks for
inviting me to speak. I live in Shorewood, Minnesota,
along with over three and a half million other people.
We are uniquely and precariously sandwiched between
two aging nuclear reactors. Our house is located about
35 air miles from the Monticello nuclear reactor and
about 45 air miles from the Prairie Island nuclear
reactor.
Before I get to the question of whether
or not to grant a re-licensing of the aging Monticello
Nuclear Power Plant to the year 2050, when it will be
twice the age that it was originally designed to run,
I would like to mention a personal interaction my wife
and I had with XCel Energy, which speaks to the question
of whether XCel Energy, as a public, quote-unquote,
utility, is maintaining a proper balance between
serving the community and making money. In the spring
of 2022, my wife and I spent $13,000 on solar panels
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for the roof of our house, which would tie into XCel
Energy's grid. Didn't expect the investment to really
save us much or any money, even in the long run, but
it seemed like a good thing to do to resist global
warming.
On the other hand, we didn't want to get
fleeced either. We didn't quarrel with the fact that
the agreement we signed with XCel Energy allowed XCel
to charge more for the electricity they sold us than
the price we got for selling to them. However, some
months after the installation was complete, XCel
unilaterally increased the difference between the price
they got and what we got. It wasn't a big change, but
it really didn't seem fair. It's possible we didn't
read the fine print of the contract with XCel carefully
enough.
It was always an impossible conflict of
interest in my opinion to expect the whole proper
monopoly XCel heavily entered in nuclear power conserve
community interest such as counting down on energy use
for the sake of global warming, keeping the community
safe and not burdening future generations with costs
and perils related to energies which future generations
would not necessarily enjoy. Plutonium waste, which
is not the only waste, but the plutonium waste from
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nuclear power plants such as Monticello, are 2 million
times more toxic than cobra venom, and have a half-life
of 24,000 years, and can't be neutralized by any kind
of chemistry, such as burning.
The way I think about it is this is so
dangerous using nuclear power in the long run. Using
nuclear power for our energy needs at this present
moment is like having a wild party that it takes the
next 10,000 or more generations of people to clean up
the mess. Do we care about our children and future
generations to come? Or do we not? XCel Energy's
proposal to extend the operating license for its aging
Monticello reactor to twice its originally accepted
life span is the epitome of irresponsibility.
To ask for this insane request when just
recently the reactor leaked 829,000 gallons of
radioactive water into the Mississippi 40 miles or so
upstream from the intakes for the water supply of
Minneapolis, this is unconscionable. The pipes began
leaking in part because the radioactive liquids that
flow through them are highly corrosive, in part because
they were not thoroughly inspected. XCel Energy
deliberately withheld the information that a leak had
occurred for months, then lied about the extent of the
danger, saying that there was no way the radioactive
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water could reach the Mississippi River.
XCel Energy then claimed the problem was
solved, only to later admit that there was another spill
greater than the first. And then to finally have to
admit that some of the tritium water had reached the
Mississippi River after all. This is the kind of
irresponsibility that shows XCel just can't do the job
it said it could. We can expect more of these. The
older the reactor gets, the same corrosion that caused
pipes to leak might cause more serious leaches in larger
containment vessels in the aging power plant. There
could be a catastrophic event.
I say no to an extended license for the
Monticello Nuclear Power Plant. Decommission this
plant. Hold XCel Energy accountable for endangering
and damaging the environment and humans, past, present
and future. There should be an understanding that the
assets of a company will be used to cover its obligations
to its workers' pensions and the decommissioning costs
of reactors.
XCel Energy should pay for future cleanup
and storage of nuclear materials accumulated during
the lifetime of the nuclear-power-generation
Minnesota. If there was any money left you and Xcel
Energy, after fully meeting its obligations regarding
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the harm that is done, that money should be used to
convert -- to bring energy production such as wind and
solar in the future. Eventually, the Prairie Island
reactor should be decommissioned as well.
XCel Energy should be replaced by a
publicly-owned and operated nonprofit utility
committed to a green non-nuclear future. Thank you.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much. Next
we will go to Kelly Lundeen.
MS. LUNDEEN: Kelly Lundeen. Thank you
for listening, accepting our public comments. I work
with an organization called Nuke Watch, and I live in
a small town of one thousand people named Shell Lake,
Wisconsin. We are not local people. We would be in
the radioactive plume if there was a meltdown at
Monticello. The only difference between my town and
yours is that instead of a large nuclear plant, we have
a lake, a beautiful lake that a lot of people from the
Twin Cities have cabins on our lake, and so that's where
we get our tax money.
And the other thing is, I know the people
work at XCel, they need good jobs, you're smart people,
you could use those talents to do decommissioning, which
should start as soon as possible.
I'm going to read from a study called Health
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Trends Near Monticello Nuclear Reactor, published by
Joseph Mangano of Radiation Public Health Project,
about the health and mortality effects. The U.S.
reactors have operated for over six decades, but federal
regulators have only conducted one study of cancer in
local residents in the U.S. That report used
statistics before 1985 and is thus outdated. No
studies are currently planned.
Monticello is in Wright County, close to
the border of Sherburne County. Almost all of the
residents of these counties live within 25 miles of
the reactor, and they are the most vulnerab left to
exposures from environmental releases. The draft EIS
neglects any mention of health and mortality statistics
among people near the Monticello reactor. Researcher
Joe Mangano has completed the report on death rates
in childhood cancer deaths in these two counties.
In the late 1960s and early '70s, before
and just after Monticello started up, the two-county
death rate was 6-7 percent below that of other Minnesota
counties for cancers and for all causes combined of
death. By the late 1970s, the two-county death rate
of Sherburne and Wright County exceeded the state rate
for all causes and has remained higher since. If the
local rate had remained 6 percent below the state, over
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4,000 fewer deaths would have occurred. So we're
talking about local children, babies, and other
community members.
Cancer death rates are also high. In the
two most recent years, 2022 and 2023, the local rate
was 9 and 20 percent above the overall state rate
respectively. Many factors can account for an elevated
risk of death, but one clue that Monticello releases
may be one factor is cancer mortality among children.
Children are much more likely to be harmed by a dose
of radiation than are adults. Prior to the early 1990s,
local child cancer mortality was 37 percent below the
statewide rate, but it has been 14 percent greater ever
since.
I also want to make some comments not
related to those effects, but just regarding tritium.
And honestly, I'll admit this, I have not read the
422 pages, but tonight was the first time I heard mention
of there was an actual reading of tritium in the
Mississippi River. I had read that it had not been
detected, and I heard that it was likely, but this is
the first time. So I'm going to have to read a little
closer. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Website
Radiation Exposure and Cancer discusses the dose risk
relationship. So how much radiation can you be exposed
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to and how likely is that going to be to cause you cancer.
And the NRC's own website acknowledges the linear
threshold model which says that any exposure comes with
increased risk.
Tritium is the radioactive form of
hydrogen, and when it becomes part of the water it
behaves the same as water. It follows the entire water
cycle. Even if you weren't worried about the tritium
in the ground water, the river water, the routine
releases that we are going to be adding onto for your
local community, 20 more years of water vapor. Tritium
in your air. So that means if you want to protect
yourself from that you're going to have to stop
breathing. Everyone who lives in this area and in a
60-mile radius.
This affects soil, plants and food grown
near nuclear reactors. They have been found to be
contaminated up to 60 miles from sites. That includes
the entire metropolitan area. While it may not be able
to penetrate skin, there are other points of exposure
to radioactive tritium, and all of the other radioactive
elements released.
So I am here to say no action alternative.
Also, please extend the comment period for others in
the community and in the United States to make their
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comments. Thank you.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much for your
comments. Next we have Lindsay Potter.
MS. POTTER: Hello, my name is Lindsay
Potter. Thank you for hosting this meeting and for
hearing all of the comments here tonight. I wanted
to start on a point that Kelly ended with, that I know
you said you heard about this already, but I think
extending the comment period is a crucially important
part of being sure that you can really hear from the
public. I think a 422-page document warrants a
sufficient amount of time to leaf through.
I even heard several NRC staff members on
my way into the meeting tonight say that they haven't
had time to make it through the 422-page document, which
seems a little bit absurd. So I am all this given the
comment period, I also wanted to note that now it's
been a full week since the online meetings were held.
Extending the comment period was also mentioned then,
and Richard Skokowski said that people should email
him in order to officially file for an extension of
the comment period or officially request that, and I
would just like to say that I know he has been emailed
on this point, and hasn't responded. So to me that
means that the NRC is also not keeping up with these
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requests and not responding to them promptly. And
during a 45-day period, a lapse of a week without a
response is a major blow to one's ability to make one's
voice heard.
On top of that I would also just like to
say that there was a list of more than a dozen questions
and I know Jessica Umana has spoken to me about this
personally tonight, but I think for the record it should
be plain to say that I think those questions were in
February and have not heard from any NRC office
regarding the answers to those. So I just think that
if the NRC is not going to be transparent and
communicative with the people who are concerned about
this project, that there needs to be, in the very least,
an extended period for comment.
Now more to the point of the comment I'd
like to make tonight. One of my biggest concerns
regarding the DEIS, which I have read portions of, but
not all of, is its lack of consideration for the safety
of public drinking water, specifically the public
drinking water pumped from the Mississippi River. Of
course, we've heard mention that the Twin Cities and
20 million other people pull their drinking water from
this river. I know that also in the meetings last week
when we raised some questions about drinking water all
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the NRC had to say was, Well, there are no private wells
within the plume of the tritiated leaked water, but
they do not in the DEIS recognize that the Mississippi
River serves as the drinking water source for millions
of people. It need not be just one private well because
the river is the source of that drinking water.
The NRC says time and again that the 829,000
gallon leak of tritiated coolant water into the ground
water poses no safety or health risk to the public,
and you have just said tonight that the amount of tritium
measured in the river is too low to affect the public.
But I'm concerned with the fact that the NRC makes
and sets its own standards for what is a concerning
dose of radiation to the public. The NRC's standard
that they've outlined is actually 25 times higher than
what the EPA deems to be as a dose of radiation in a
year.
The EPA is talking about what is safe to
a large adult male who is drinking two liters of water
a day. So if you're a pregnant woman who drinks twice
that much and has a fetus growing inside of you, your
risk consuming that same amount of radiation is going
to be far, far greater. So I don't see how an
organization who sets its own limits, and the acronym
they use is that the radiation should be as low as
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reasonably achievable. So that clearly caters to the
utility, to XCel, to the other operating nuclear
reactors, that all that they're responsible to for the
public is to get the level that's easy for them to
achieve. But it doesn't match the EPA's requirement.
And I don't see how you can draw a line
in the sand and say on one side of this fence what the
NRC says is safe goes, but on the other side of the
fence the limits might be different. And so in the
DEIS you clearly outlined the fact that the river water,
especially at high water stages, merges with and is
indistinguishable from the ground water. It explains
in the DEIS how the river water reverses its direction,
the course of its flow and starts flowing towards the
plant, towards the reactor and is inseparable from the
ground water.
So I don't think that it's reasonable that
this regulatory body could say, Okay, well here is a
clear line and those waters can be kept distinct from
each other. Even if you say that the amounts that have
been found in the river now are too low to cause harm,
I would say the river is swiftly moving. So when were
those tests conducted, and how can any of the tests
conducted after the fact really determine the full
amount of tritiated water that reached the river?
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Especially when the estimate for the leaked water was
doubled a year after the initial leak? That still has
not been explained as well. How was it determined that
the quantity of the leaked water is suddenly 829,000
gallons instead of 400,000 gallons? And why should
that estimate be believed to be any more accurate than
the original one was if there's no accountability and
there's no explanation for why and how this amount could
so dramatically change and could be reported to have
changed so far after the fact?
And all I would say is, in addition to that,
is that the EPA is also currently reviewing their
recommendations on tritium and ground water, and has
published in the federal register the fact that they're
trying to figure out if those limitations should be
stricter. So the EPA is moving towards stricter
limits, believing that the limit that they originally
set, which I think they set in 1977, were very poorly
informed compared to what information is available by
today's standards and using today's science.
I would also say that I'm sorry to call
your name out, but Mr. Phil Meyer, who is your specialist
on ground water and was the consultant for this report,
did not know that the EPA is currently reviewing those
standards. So again, I see a large discretion between
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the way that the NRC chooses to define public safety
in the way that other trusted sources define public
safety, and I don't see why you should be able to say
that something within your bubble of jurisdiction is
suddenly immune from this other oversight and immune
from having to meet these standards of safety that are
agreed upon by other parts of the public.
And with that I would say I don't believe
that the NRC has proven that by making and following
their own rules without regard for public
accountability and safety that they can be trusted to
deem the reactor's operation is safe. Thank you.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you for your comments.
Next we will turn to David Luce.
MR. LUCE: Sorry, my mouth is dry.
MR. KLUKAN: No worries.
MR. LUCE: I won't be able to speak unless
I water it. My name is David Luce, L-U-C-E. I'm a
member of the Farview Neighborhood Plot Club in the
city of Minneapolis. Several years ago I attended an
event by some of your colleagues or former colleagues
in the city of Plymouth, Minnesota, and it was called
Waste Confidence. I'm a college graduate, went to
college, and I couldn't ever figure out what that phrase
meant, Waste Confidence, but I'll come back to the
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confidence.
So my wife and I drink tap water in
Minneapolis. It comes from the Minneapolis Water
Department and it's treated with some chemicals for
some issues. So we drink chemically-treated
Mississippi River water. And I actually like it with
ice cubes. It seems to taste better with ice cubes,
in fact, it's reminiscent of the water that I drank
as a child from a 514 well in the Minneapolis area.
So confidence, I heard the term stakeholder
confidence here tonight. I'm not sure exactly what
that means, but I'm interested in my own confidence
in clean safe drinking water for myself, my neighbors,
my family, the young families that are moving into
Minneapolis with small children and who are having more
children in Minneapolis. And I have to say that my
clean water confidence, as far as tap water in the city
of Minneapolis goes, is extremely low in terms of is
this water safe to drink? And what are the
consequences, the long-term consequences of drinking
this water or raising children drinking this water?
So keeping it really short, my confidence
in the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the
federal government, is very low, extremely low, and
my confidence that the NRC as a regulator of a deadly
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dinosaur industry, while also being an apologist for
this deadly industry, what sort of regulation of this
deadly industry can happen when you're also a kind of
PR agency for the whole industry. When are you going
to actually shut down one of these extremely dangerous
nuclear stations, nuclear power stations?
I'd like to ask everyone in the room how
much confidence does anyone have that there won't be
a nuclear power station meltdown in the United States
of America in your or your children's lifetime? How
confident is anyone in the room? That's my question.
And when is the NRC going to shut down one of these
stations or let the license expire and not re-license
it beyond its safe lifetime, if there actually is a
safe lifetime for any nuclear power station. Thank
you very much.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you for your comments.
Next we're going to turn back to you, Raymond? I'm
done with my list of individuals who indicated upon
registration that they'd like to speak. Is there
anyone else who would like to speak this evening, or
offer comments, I should say? Anyone else? Going
once, twice. You're welcome to come back up to the
microphone.
MR. LAFORGE: John LaForge again. I'd
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just like to reiterate that I too would recommend that
the comment period be extended, particularly because
issuance of the draft EIS was two months late, and that
really crunched the amount of time we had to study it.
Add my voice to that too, thanks.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you. Anyone else have
anything they'd like to add? Or else we will turn to
the song. So for the transcription, as well as to be
fair to the camera person, if you wouldn't mind coming
up here. Assemble yourselves in the general area.
I don't know where you want us to put instruments, but
you want to turn this around or face this way when you
play, whatever you'd like to do. I saw that you were
passing out lyrics. I didn't know if you wanted to
- I feel like it's easier to lead a song if you're facing
the people.
MS. SCHUBERT: I need to read part of this
that I go over again.
MR. KLUKAN: Sure.
MS. SCHUBERT: So all I want to say is that
this is a call and response song. The last sentence
of each verse is repeated so people can repeat that
with us if they would like to. I don't know if I can
turn around.
MR. KLUKAN: Come to this side and then
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face this way.
MS. SCHUBERT: I could do that. I have
to be on that side. Okay. Yeah, that'll help.
(Singing) I heard it from the trees and
a mountain flower high. I heard it in the river and
the fishes swimming by. I heard it in the earth and
I heard it in the sky. Nuclear power is no good for
you and I. Nuclear power is no good for you and I.
Power to the people, that's the way it ought
to be. Power from the sun and thermals in the sea.
Power from the wind and biomass. Nuclear power is no
good for us. Nuclear power is no good for us.
The children grow around us with dreams
in their eyes. They look to us for help and they trust
that we are wise. We fill their world with poison from
nuclear waste. Nuclear power is such a disgrace.
Nuclear power is such a disgrace.
Power to the people, that's the way it ought
to be. Power from the sun and thermals in the sea.
Power from the wind and biomass. Nuclear power is no
good for us. Nuclear power is no good for us.
In 2621 the waste around my town will only be
half gone. 800 generations will live with our mess.
Nuclear power causes human distress. Nuclear power
causes human distress.
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Power to the people, that's the way it ought
to be. Power from the sun and thermals in the sea.
Power from the wind and biomass. Nuclear power is no
good for us. Nuclear power is no good for us.
An Xcel reactor is too out of date. We should
have decommissioned it in 2011. Leaked into the
Mississippi radioactive tritium, let's shut it down
now before it does more harm. Let's shut it down now
before it does more harm.
Power to the people, that's the way it ought
to be. Power from the sun and thermals in the sea.
Power from the wind and biomass. Nuclear power is no
good for us. Nuclear power is no good for us.
You've got to shut it down. We keep making
nuclear power and kill humankind. Nuclear power is
a terrible crime. Nuclear power is a terrible crime.
Power to the people, that's the way it ought
to be. Power from the sun and thermals in the sea.
Power from the wind and biomass. Nuclear power is no
good for us. Nuclear power is no good for us.
If you care about creatures and a river passing
by, if you listen to your commonsense you'll know the
reason why. If you care about the earth and humanity,
we've got to stop this nuclear power insanity. We've
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got to stop this nuclear power insanity.
Power to the people, that's the way it ought
to be. Power from the sun and thermals in the sea.
Power from the wind and biomass. Nuclear power is no
good for us. Nuclear power is no good for us.
Thank you. Thank you.
MR. KLUKAN: Thank you very much. And for
the transcript, that was Roger and Jo. Okay, all right,
before I turn it over to Steve for closing remarks,
I just wanted to thank you for participating, coming
out tonight and participating and offering your
comments here this evening. I'd also like to thank
the city for allowing us this opportunity to use this
wonderful and beautiful venue.
And with that, we'll turn it over to Steve
for closing remarks.
MR. KOENICK: Thank you, Brett, and thank
you again to the city of Monticello. This is a very
nice venue for these types of events. And on behalf
of the staff I would like to thank everyone for taking
the time to attend tonight's meeting and provide very
thoughtful comments and questions, and your song. I'd
like to briefly summarize our next steps. We are
currently about halfway through this open period. We
have your requests to extend the comment period. We
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are considering that, and we will notify you directly
or update our website accordingly, but as a person
mentioned, we will make a decision soon so you can act
accordingly. So thank you for that.
And our team will gather the comments we
heard today, as well as the comments we heard last week,
as well as all the comments that will be submitted.
Yes, you have your hand up?
MS. FOUSHEE: Does everyone that wants an
extension have to request it?
MR. KOENICK: No. No, we have enough.
We have sufficient requests. So thank you, and good
clarification there. And we do have, going back a few
slides, so if you have additional comments, here are
the ways to submit your comments as Jessica mentioned
earlier in her presentation. And once again, we will
be looking at this meeting that was transcribed and
we will delineate all the comments. And we will parse
through all the comments that we heard, and this will
be addressed within the final EIS. So there is going
to be an Appendix A in the final Environmental Impact
Statement that we'll address all of the comments that
were received through whichever means that they were.
And so we will combine them, we'll evaluate
and disposition them, and then we anticipate issuing
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the final impact statement in October of this year,
and Jessica has already mentioned the numerous ways
that you can gain access to these reports. And I
believe we did have a couple copies left. Do we still
have a few copies if anybody is interested for that?
So with that, thank you again for your
comments and for taking the time.
MR. LUCE: Excuse me, sir. I have a
procedural question.
MR. KOENICK: Yes.
MR. LUCE: I mentioned that I live in the
city of Minneapolis and the city water comes from the
river. And that I had gone to a previous meeting in
Plymouth that the NRC put on. And now we're meeting
in Monticello. Since Minneapolis residents are some
of the closest residents who are most affected by
drinking the river water, I'd like to know if you would
hold a meeting in Minneapolis to explain your
conclusions to the residents who are most affected by
drinking the water from the Mississippi.
MR. KOENICK: In order to do a wide reach
of individuals, that is the component of the virtual
meeting that we held last week, which is widely
accessible by people all over. So that's how we try
to be more accessible to a wider audience by conducting
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a virtual meeting as well as in certain cases in public
meetings. And the report is available for persons to
review and provide comments. Thank you.
So that with that, once again thank you
for taking the time to attend today's meeting, and I
hope you have a pleasant evening. So thank you.
MR. KLUKAN: Just one final comment, with
that, thank you again and we look forward to meeting
again. Thank you and with that, good night.
(Whereupon, the above-entitled matter went
off the record at 7:29 p.m.)
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