Page 22 - May-June 2013

Fukushima,
a Game
Changer
By David Skeen, U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission.
David Skeen
During the accident at the Fukushima
Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in March
2011, Mr. Skeen served as an on-shift
Director of the
Reactor Safety
Team in the
NRC’s Emergency
Operations Center
for two months
following the
accident, and was
involved in the NRC
efforts to support
the U.S. Embassy
and the Government
of Japan in
responding to the
accident.
In the Fall of 2011,
he was named
Director of the
NRC’s Japan
Lessons Learned
Project Directorate, to lead the NRC’s
lessons-learned effort resulting from
the Near Term Task Force Report,
“Recommendations for Enhancing
Reactor Safety in the 21st Century,”
that was issued in July 2011. He is
responsible for managing NRC’s efforts
to implement the lessons learned from
the Fukushima accident at all U.S.
nuclear power plants.
He is a graduate of the Federal Senior
Executive Services (SES) Candidate
Development Program, and served as
the Deputy Director of the Division of
Engineering from 2009 to 2011. Mr.
Skeen holds a B.S. degree in Electrical
Engineering from West Virginia
University.
An interview by Newal Agnihotri,
Editor of Nuclear Plant Journal at the
Regulatory Information Conference in
Bethesda, Maryland on March 13, 2013.
1. Does every US plant have an
emergency response center similar to the
one at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power
plant? Also, what is its function during
the normal operation as well as during
the emergencies?
We don’t have a seismically isolated
building. Every plant has a technical
support center (TSC).
Initially in an accident the control
room handles the issues that are going on.
But if things go beyond the control room’s
resources for any reason, they go to the
technical support center which is on site.
It is not a seismically
qualified building
like the power plant
itself, but it is built to
building codes that
are local standards.
We also have
the emergency oper-
ations facility which
is 25 miles or farther
off from the site.
Licensee man-
agers first go to the
TSC on site but then
if they have to have
support from off site
at the emergency
operations facility,
they bring in corpo-
rate people, maybe
people from other
plants that they own if
it’s a multiple licensee. They have people
from the corporate office there that can
provide technical support to the people at
the site.
The whole idea of the emergency
operations facility is that there are
technical support groups to support the
people in the TSC or the control room
whatever their need is – more engineers,
more experts, depending on what the
issues that they are dealing with.
2. How does the convention on nuclear
safety enable sharing of information
among different countries worldwide?
The convention on nuclear safety is
an international treaty. All of the countries
with nuclear power plants are signatory
to this.
As with other international treaties,
it goes through our Senate and has to be
ratified. It’s actually a post-Chernobyl
group that got together. This came about
in the early 1990’s. We meet every three
years on a continuing basis for two weeks,
and every signatory to that convention has
to write a national report on “Here’s how
my program works. Here is what is going
on.” It includes operating experience,
if you’ve built new reactors, if you’ve
shut down reactors; you talk about your
program in your country. It’s a peer-review
meeting. They go to the IAEA offices in
Vienna. We have a meeting where each
country presents the results of their
reports and gets questions from the other
contracting parties to the convention.
We have this on-going discussion all the
time. After Fukushima, it was decided
that we would hold a special meeting; we
called it an extraordinary meeting for the
commission on nuclear safety in August
2012 to talk only about the lessons learned
from Fukushima.
We spent a week just talking about
what every country was doing to learn
the lessons from Fukushima. I think
the summary report of that is a public
document.
Basically all the countries identified
very similar lessons learned from the
Fukushima event. Each country may
be addressing it in a slightly different
ways that go along with their regulatory
infrastructure or their cultural system
or how they help their social structure.
Everybody is addressing sort of the same
type of issues whether it is prolonged
station blackout event, or loss of the
ultimate heat sink. Everyone identified
the same kind of issues that they need to
go back and look at. All countries with
nuclear power plants are doing the very
similar things.
3. How many days must a U.S. nuclear
power plant keep operating without off-
site power?
Our near-term task force looked at
prolonged station blackout and said we
didn’t really address that very well in the
past. After 9-11 and the terrorist attacks,
wehadrequired licensees tohaveastrategy
that says if a large fire or explosion at your
22 NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2013