January 4, 2000
Technidigm-2000
Level One Opinion
Comments on the
Revised Reactor Oversight Process
Roundtable Public Meetings
Objectives and Questions
January 2000
Comments on the
Revised Reactor Oversight Process
Roundtable Public Meetings
Objectives and Questions
January 2000
- Charles R. Jones
Germantown, MD
Nuclear Safety Professional
cjones@Technidigm.org
When one looks at the questions in terms of the objectives, it is apparent that the main focus of the Roundtable meetings is to determine how best to obtain and sustain public confidence in the new process, the second listed objective. Four of the questions involve that one objective. By comparison, the first objective gets two questions (1 and 2), which are arguably the same question. The third and fourth objectives each get one question (7 and 8, respectively), neither of which can achieve consensus in the absence of agreement on (with a positive answer) the preceding questions. Thus, the first eight questions are at least in reasonable order.
The last question (9) is not directly related
to the objectives, but it certainly is worth asking last, assuming that
everyone knows that they are supposed to include even the lowliest nuclear
plant worker and the most junior NRC inspectors in the list of "stakeholders."
Unfortunately, the NRC and industry nuclear safety cultures are weak in
this area, so there are no assurances that all the stakeholders are given
voice. Ignoring the future for a moment, the first question should
actually be "Are all the stakeholders represented at the Roundtable?"
.
Assuming that all the stakeholders are recognized and empowered, we can comment on the objectives and questions if we are allowed to assume that each objective and question is satisfied with an affirmative consensus.
The First Objective is to maintain safety by establishing an oversight framework that ensures continued safe plant operation.
Of course, the oversight framework itself ensures nothing. It enables the stakeholders, primarily the licensees and the NRC, to apply a reasonably well thought out and organized thought process in dealing with a myriad of conditions and issues important to nuclear plant safety and, thus, public safety. The framework depends greatly on the ability and goodwill of these principal stakeholders since they are the ones with the most direct access to the necessary and available inside knowledge. Within the ranks of the licensees and the NRC are the relatively low level individuals who really know what is going on. Within an appropriately structured and sustained nuclear safety culture at the plants and within the NRC, the proposed oversight framework should work just fine. In my opinion, currently the NRC and its Regions and many licensees do not have such a nuclear safety culture structure. Thus, it is essential to the success of the framework that culture structure becomes credible.
The first Roundtable question under this objective is (1) "Do you believe the new oversight process will provide adequate assurance that plants are being operated safely?" To deal with this question without being too quarrelsome about definitions of adequate, assurance, and safety, it is useful to first compare the new process with the old one. The NRC previously was pretty aggressive in ferreting out a lot of little issues such that the best operating (performing) licensees were for the most part motivated to ensure attention was paid to the big issues.
That specific motivation is diminished by the new process, although it can be argued that the licensees are now motivated to stay "in the green" on their performance indicators. They are also now motivated to minimize performance indicators and either avoid experiencing symptoms (e.g., "You better not scram the plant or you are fired!") or avoid reporting them (e.g., "That was not really a scram, was it?"). Again, success requires some assurance of a proper and sustained nuclear safety culture among all the key stakeholders at all nuclear plants throughout the license period, including decommissioning and decontamination.
The second Roundtable question related to this objective is (2) "Do you believe that the new oversight program will provide sufficient regulatory attention to utilities with performance problems?" By definition, the utilities and plants with performance problems will also have a weak nuclear safety culture as well as several other organizational and management problems. The question is almost answered with an "Obviously not." The oversight program requires the utilities to all place themselves on report with no motivation to do so. If nothing else, the nuclear industry history to date has demonstrated that poorly performing plants show up in cycles, even among the best plants, and the poorly performing plants often do not even self-recognize themselves since they would have to be good performing plants (talented, good performing organization and people) to do so in the first place. Each of the members of the Roundtable is invited to list at least one plant that fits this description.
Moreover, there are two sides to the question, one side of which involves the ability of the NRC to recognize issues and proper corrective actions, assuming they are even identified and presented by the poorly performing licensee. The NRC is subject to the same industry degradations in people and expertise as are the licensees, degradations some of which are cyclic but some of which reflect the general decline in nuclear expertise nationwide. The success of the new regulatory framework depends greatly on retaining and even improving the NRC's technical inspection and evaluation ability, as well as ensuring a good and sustained nuclear safety culture among all of the many decisionmaking levels within the organization.
Conclusion: The first objective, continued safe plant operation, can be met if the proposed framework is understood and thoroughly executed by licensees and regulators having an adequate nuclear safety culture.
The first of the four questions related to this objective is (3) "Does the new oversight process enhance public confidence by increasing the predictability, consistency, clarity and objectivity of NCR's oversight?" The answer to this question is, in terms of the proposed framework itself, "Probably so." For those members of the public who are technically competent to recognize the elegance and proper application of the framework, there is no doubt that this is an enhancement over previous methods. Assuming the first objective is achieved through an adequate nuclear safety culture for the primary participating stakeholders, this aspect of the second objective is made to be feasible among knowledgeable members of the public, of which there are many.
The second question for this objective is (4) "Does the available public information associated with the revised reactor oversight process including the NRC's web page, provide an appropriately balanced view of licensee performance?" Unhappily, the NRC's web page information on the revised reactor oversight process can be easily criticized for a high level of confusion and user frustration. Since I maintain and serve as web master for my own page (http://Technidigm.org), I can say with some authority that the NRC has a long way to go in this area. Of all the web sites available to the public today, the NRC site has the widest range of good and bad in terms of user friendliness. Unfortunately, the new oversight process seems to be at the low end of the range right now.
While the average user can find reasonable explanations of the process, the inspection data are poorly presented, and emerging information or support seems fairly inaccessible or lame. For example, when I tried to sign up online for the January 2000 Pilot Plant Workshop, the online registration form did not work properly and my registration was rejected due to a mysterious error, identified only as "realname required." When I inspected the registration form's underlying code (html), I discovered that the the form could not accept the name field due to a programming error. I corrected the error, guessing at what was intended, and was able to submit the form and get a proper "Thank you for registering." from the NRC server. I was also able to send the NRC a heads-up on the problem. Other people have mentioned the basic lack of information or the untimely or confusing posting on the Internet site. The ADAMS interface is one of the least friendly approaches that I have ever found on the Internet, and the NRC's presentation of it is frustrating. The NRC as well as the licensees would be better off just doing everything in HTML web pages. It also does not seem worthwhile to dwell on this hopefully transitory defect too much during the Roundtables.
The third question for this objective is (5) "Do you believe the NRC is providing the public with timely and understandable information on plant performance?" The primary concern that I have is that I have not yet found a good presentation of the pilot plant results. It is easy to present facts, but it is hard to produce a good presentation of those facts, especially when the interface is the Internet. Nevertheless, most public stakeholders are well able to develop their own presentations if they can at least find the facts. The NRC will not be able to take credit for timeliness and clarity, much less having good presentations or a balanced view of licensee performance (question 4). Of course, this will naturally improve somewhat with the addition of more data over the next several years for comparisons with the first set of results. Nevertheless, it is important for the NRC to focus on the early presentations if the NRC would like to take credit for clarity.
The fourth question for this objective is (6) "Is the information provided by the NRC appropriate to keep the public informed of agency activities related to the plants?" This is yet to be shown since the primary NRC activities of interest include the more specialized followup actions needed for the identified weakest plants. As mentioned above, the primary element that is still missing for identifying the weak plants is an assurance of an adequate nuclear safety culture throughout the industry, including the NRC staff.
Conclusion: Overall, the second objective,
public confidence, can be met with a substantial increase in the NRC attention
to the public's medium of choice, the Internet, and a substantial commitment
to reaching the first objective of achieving a credible safety framework
within a strong nuclear safety culture across the entire regulatory environment.
The Third Objective is to improve effectiveness, efficiency and realism through an oversight process by focusing resources on the most risk significant issues.
This objective requires some preliminary notes to establish a proper understanding of what is being said here. Risk significance is one of those things best understood by Senior Reactor Operators (SRO), since they are actually trained on the entire nuclear plant's capabilities, which includes all the safety systems, the lowly "balance of plant," and related procedures, as well as the requirements for those systems under a myriad of different conditions. The commercial industry is handicapped somewhat relative to the Navy reactor plants since the commercial industry separates operators and maintenance people, although there may be little choice in this due to complexity and union issues.
Thus, I would maintain that it is far easier to work in an environment of risk awareness efficiency in the Navy than in the commercial nuclear industry. Yet, some of the more experienced Navy people have a better feel for the subjective aspects of risk since they have been able to bring many design, construction, test, operations, and maintenance issues together and focus their basic multi-dimensional understanding on risk. For example, at one nuclear plant I had a non-Navy plant risk expert serve as an advisor, an experienced person who was also a qualified SRO at that plant. His job was to provide me with his insights on the relative risks of 150 physical plant upgrade projects as I balanced risk issues against everything else involved, including the usual cost factors, but also including issues of maintenance, testing, and inter-system support or options. I usually took his advice, but I occasionally had to override it and take other issues into account.
Therefore, I am probably one of the most skeptical of all of the possible people you can find in the industry when it comes to trying to compare and regulate plants based on risk. Being risk informed is a complex task and only gets us part way down the path to success. While I am sure risk oriented regulation is feasible, it is not something everyone can do after reading a guide book or regulation. The forces of capitalism and politics being such as they are, the risk sword (safety significance) needs to be picked up by the right people and wielded very carefully in trimming the fat off of regulatory inefficiency.
The question associated with this objective is (7) "Do you believe the new oversight process improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the NRC's regulatory process, focusing agency resources on those issues with the most safety significance?" The simple answer is "Of course it does!" With the proper approach and with well trained people in an effective nuclear safety culture, it would be difficult to conceive of how focusing the agency's current level of resources in a systematic way to address the most dangerous problems could result in anything but an improvement. Unfortunately, everyone understands that the real intent here is to reduce the NRC's level of effort and resources. Thus, this is not a valid (true) objective as stated.
There is one other problem, even if the NRC were to decide to increase its resources. As I explained in my book On-the-Level: Common Sense, Technically Speaking <http://Technidigm.org>, transitional projects usually require more resources over a period of time. (Time and resources are 2 of the 12 elements of my Technidigm-2000 solution framework.) The effect of this is to ensure that the NRC will not be addressing some things that it addressed in the past, when it actually attempted to address everything that had anything to do with nuclear safety. I should point out that the Navy nuclear safety culture is such that everything that has to do with the reactor plant is addressed, a big distinction that is often lost in the commercial nuclear industry due to issues of cost.
The point is that the NRC has always limited its oversight to the most risk significant equipment and issues. Attempting to go further such that some things important to safety (but not in the category of most important) are actually neglected would be a problem. Yet, this is exactly what the NRC and the industry seem to be moving toward. While it is reasonable to give attention to each area or issue in accordance with its importance to safety, it is not reasonable to ignore something that is at the low end of the list just because we choose not to spend the money to look at it. If the licensees know that the NRC will never look at something, then some of them will be induced to take it off their list entirely. Focusing on the most risk important issues will cause a deferral of a problem in those areas (the things that are most important) to a reasonably controlled later date, but this process also serves to guarantee an eventual (100 percent guaranteed) failure of all of the rest of the things that are allowed to be neglected entirely.
Another aspect of this that is that there is not likely to be a one-to-one correlation between risk and the amount of resources needed to protect against that risk. Some high risk items of interest might be very easy to check, while the less interesting but still critical items of interest might be very difficult to check. Thus, the answer to the question posed is that, indeed, the NRC will be more efficient and may even cover a larger mathematical measure of risk, but the process will be very effective in skewing the failure rates and thus the consequences associated with the neglected items. It is not appropriate to argue or decide about the objective's separate components of effectiveness, efficiency, and realism in this case since they are disconnected from nuclear safety as soon as you specify focusing on the "most risk significant issues." It is like saying a doctor should apply resources for a child if the child has cancer but not if the child needs a stitch. Without proper and timely action, minor problems become big ones. The doctor can not easily delegate decisions regarding stitches to the children or the parents of such children based on their perceived need of having to focus the available medical resources on cancer risks. It is neither effective, efficient, or realistic. The risk factors start shifting.
Thus, the NRC and the industry have not clearly established how it is that they can increase effectiveness, efficiency, and realism merely by focusing resources on the most risk significant issues. This is especially a concern in an environment where the goal is constrained by expectations of an overall reduction in costs even during a transitional period. The NRC's budget process and political expectations have already formed a brick wall in the path of this objective, a wall that no one seems to want to look at, much less remove.
Conclusion: The third objective can be
met after a redefinition of where the NRC intends to spend its regulatory
resources, namely to cover all the bases, risk important or not.
Interestingly, the framework seems to do this even if the stated objective
does not. Again, all of this needs to be undertaken within a strong
nuclear safety culture among the licensees and within the NRC organization.
The Fourth objective is to reduce unnecessary regulatory burden for licensees and the NRC.
No one can argue with the objective since anything that is unnecessary is unnecessary. The problem comes in defining what is and what is not necessary regulatory burden. Some would have us believe that the unnecessary part of the burden is the aggregate of things that are not of the highest safety risk. If the NRC inspects less, the burden is less for the NRC and for the licensees. I think the real objective here is to avoid overemphasis on things that have already been identified and have also been reasonably dealt with. In my experience, most of the burden of regulatory excess has been the relatively uncoordinated range of regulatory inspections imposed, often without much consideration of importance. Sometimes this is done out of organizational ignorance and sometimes out of true technical ignorance. The proposed process is highly organized and can be implemented in a highly coordinated manner. The result will obviously be less regulatory burden. Nevertheless, the net safety result of a reduced burden is highly dependent on the NRC and licensee nuclear safety culture and the level of technical expertise that is applied within the range of the remaining necessary burden.
Since I have more than a masters degree in engineering as well as a lot of practical experience with reactor plant systems, I am sometimes surprised at some of the ill-founded observations and conclusions created by less educated and less experienced inspectors. (I am normally more humble.) Many plants and even the NRC rely on inspectors and design engineers with a minimal bachelor of science degree, and it is common for them to use people with no real technical education at all. At one plant, the maintenance manager actually went out and found someone with less knowledge and experience to lead a major valve corrective action program. He had already decided what the problem was and had made an agreement with the NRC as to what to do about before he called me up to lead the corrective action team. When I discovered that he was going down the wrong corrective action path, he was mostly fearful that the NRC would find out that the agreed upon plan of action was foolish (Part 21). He was able to find someone on the other side of the country to bring in and carry out the errant corrective actions, someone who was equally ignorant of the real problem. Thus, we again get back to the basic theme of nuclear safety culture.
The question for this objective is (8) "Do you believe the new oversight process reduces unnecessary regulatory burden on licensees and the NRC?" Since it is the general intent of this entire exercise to do just that, I do not know how we can miss making this happen. It would not be surprising however, if the necessary burden actually went up, either temporarily or permanently. While there may have been a lot of wasted effort on less important matters, it is not necessarily true that the newly defined process represents a net decrease in either short or long term inspection or regulatory burden. This is what I call "wishful thinking," a recurrent ailment at many nuclear plants and within the NRC since the genesis of the nuclear industry. It is yet to be proven (vice assumed) that the net effect is a reduction in required effort. Once all of the plants are brought into the process and after the complementary areas are looked at for the rest of the plants, it is possible that the long term burden will go down. It is almost a guarantee, however, that the short term burden will be higher, at least for the NRC.
Conclusion: The new process will definitely
reduce the unnecessary regulatory burden for everyone involved, but it
may increase the level of necessary burden. This distinction can
be dealt with best within an overall nuclear safety culture that presumes
nothing in its effort to achieve efficient, effective, and realistic excellence.
The last question is (9) "Are there other appropriate means by which the agency could solicit stakeholder feedback, in a timely, structured and consistent manner, on the pilot program or on full program implementation?"
One of the immediate problems evident in the NRC approach that has not been mentioned above is the short period of time allowed even for the plant-specific Roundtable discussions. I think that it would be prudent for the NRC to schedule much more time so that the various stakeholders would be encouraged to participate and get everything on the table, both the good stuff (useful) and the bad (useless). By allowing only two hours, the NRC is sending the message that this is not a serious undertaking. The NRC should be asking "Who wants to speak and participate? How long would you like to have to present your material or views?" The numbers should be added up and then doubled. The preliminary schedule can then be made up based on that input. It could all be over in one hour or it might take 40 hours.
It is my experience in working with both the DOE and the NRC that public meetings are often handled poorly, usually with little respect for the non-supportive individuals who want to participate. There may be a ratio of ten to one between those who are a waste of time and those who have something important to say. Indeed, sometimes someone in tennis shoes, sawed off jeans, long hair, and beard makes a critical point that no one bothered to mention before. An example is when Vic Stello presided over a public meeting for the DOE's tritium producing K-Reactor, presenting the results of the Operational Readiness Review (for which I led the maintenance and test sub-team). One of the concerned citizens with such an appearance simply stated that the DOE really did not need so much tritium anyway since it only served as a booster for the warheads. You could still get a nuclear yield without it. Vic Stello pulled me aside later to ask me if what this guy said was true. I told him that it was true. This revelation impacted Vic's decisions on the subsequent shutdown of the K-Reactor. No one had ever bothered to tell Vic (an NRC transplant manager) that tritium was optional and that there was no hurry to replace it anyway. He had just assumed that it was needed and needed now.
This is one answer to the last question: Listen longer and more patiently; wear out the speakers if you can.
There are other things that could be done, such as:
email address: cjones@Technidigm.org