The Honorable Richard

The Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste (ACNW) is charged with reviewing the NRC's safety research and development activities in the Nuclear Waste Safety Arena. The Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards (NMSS) handles work related to the disposal of spent fuel and high-level waste (HLW). NMSS contracts with the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses (CNWRA) for HLW technical assistance. Part of the $15.5M in FY 2000 funding allocated for HLW technical assistance is for work that the Committee considers to be " research. " The Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research (RES) conducts and contracts for research in all areas not related to the disposal of HLW at Yucca Mountain. The waste-related research program in RES is small, $2.3M for research on radionuclide transport and decommissioning and $1.5M for radiation protection and health effects (including clearance work). Observations and Recommendations ! The ACNW judges CNWRA's work on Yucca Mountain to be of very high quality. The RES-supported research that the ACNW reviewed this year involves excellent scientists, is timely, and of high quality. ! Although the partitioning of the HLW work in NMSS and the non-HLW work in RES generally causes no major problems, more coordination between the two offices is needed on issues that overlap the HLW and non-HLW areas. ! The HLW program needs to be expanded to have a modest long-term, " anticipatory " research component, perhaps through collaboration between NMSS and RES. ! The Analytical Hierarchy Program used by RES to prioritize projects fails to account properly for the importance of waste-related research; the prioritization method should be revised to overcome this failure.