Robotics &
USNRC
By Steven West and Thomas Nicholson,
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Steven West
Steven West is the Deputy Director of the
NRC’s Office of Nuclear Security and
Incident Response. He joined the NRC
in 1985 in the Office
of Nuclear Reactor
Regulation (NRR).
Over the following
twenty years, he
held increasingly
responsible
positions in NRR
including Systems
Engineer; Project
Manager; Senior
Fire Protection
Engineer; Chief,
Fire Protection
Engineering and
Special Projects
Section; Chief,
Policy and
Rulemaking Section;
and Chief, License
Renewal Section.
In 2005, Steven
was appointed to the Senior Executive
Service (SES) and transferred to NRC
Region III, Chicago, Illinois, where he
served as the Director of the Division
of Reactor Safety and then the Director
of the Division of Reactor Projects. In
2013, Steven returned to Headquarters
and served as the Deputy Director of the
Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research
before assuming his current position.
Steven holds a Bachelor of Science
degree from the University of Maryland
and is a graduate of the 2005 NRC SES
Candidate Development Program.
An interview by Newal Agnihotri, Editor
of Nuclear Plant Journal, at the NRC’s
Regulatory Information Conference in
Bethesda, Maryland on March 9, 2016.
Steven West:
As the Office of
Research, we try to stay abreast of
developments in the industry that
could have some impact on regulation,
regulatory activities, or that we need
to know about in the future to make
sure we’re prepared to handle them in
regulatory space. So, we are looking
ahead, and Tom is one of our visionaries
who’s out there looking for what’s over the
horizon that we should be aware of now,
so we can learn about it and decide how
much we need to know and do we need
to pursue it, or can
we wait a while and
maybe look at it
again later.
I got interested
in robotics because
I’ve been very in-
volved in the inter-
national activities
associated with Fu-
kushima. There’s a
growing reliance on
robotic and related
sensor technology
at the Fukushima
site to support the
decommissioning
activities and some
of the other activi-
ties that are happen-
ing at Fukushima to monitor and mitigate
contamination, and limit the spread of
radiation. Because of these activities, the
Japanese are developing both new robotic
technologies and new applications of ex-
isting robotic and sensor technologies.
A major driver in this work is to protect
workers from radiation exposures using
robots and remote systems. Using these
technologies can speed up decommis-
sioning because they do not need direct
human involvement in high-radiation en-
vironments. This work builds on Japan’s
reaching out around the world to see what
kind of assistance and support they can
get to help them with robotics.
Thomas
Nicholson:
Our
involvement with robotic technologies
began with a research seminar on
Fukushima Daiichi presented by Kenji
Tateiwa from TEPCO. He provided a
spellbinding presentation to our technical
staff and management on the status of
clean-up activities at Fukushima. Our
NRC Chairman at the time, Allison M.
Macfarlane, introduced to the NRC staff
and invited guests from EPA and the
White House. During his presentation,
Kenji described how they had to start
thinking about decommissioning and
cleanup. So he showed us how they
were using robotics to access the site
and inventory the damage and radiation
levels by transmitting data to create three-
dimensional portrayals, renditions, of
what’s inside those damaged buildings.
And by doing that, they realized that
the situation was far more difficult than
they had originally thought. And so, by
using these robotics, they were getting
a much better understanding of what
really happened during and following
the accident. Kenji illustrated his points
through videos showing the robots’
activities to conduct surveillance and
monitoring inside the damaged buildings.
Kenji’s presentation was a major
motivator in beginning our education in
learning how robotics are or could be
used at nuclear facilities which is the
theme of our RIC session.
West:
Through this activity that
Tom and I were involved in, in setting
up the research seminar and then
hearing about this, and later traveling
to Fukushima a couple of times where
I saw with my own eyes what was going
on, we said, should we take a broader
look at the use of robotics? And make a
long story short, we said yes, we should.
And then we began organizing ourselves
by contacting the Robot Test Facility at
NIST, the National Institute of Standards
and Technology. The more we dug into
this, the more we saw other government
agencies that were either interested in
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NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2016
