Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2016 NuclearPlantJournal.com
31
Thomas Nicholson
Thomas Nicholson is a Senior Technical
Advisor in the Division of Risk Analysis
of the Office of Nuclear Regulatory
Research (RES) within the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC). He
has worked at the
NRC for 39 years,
primarily in RES.
His principal
responsibility is to
provide technical
advice to NRC
senior management
concerning
radionuclide
migration in the
subsurface at
NRC-licensed
facilities. His work
focuses on research
in radionuclide
transport at nuclear
facilities, primarily
due to abnormal,
accidental releases
in the subsurface. He
has formulated and directed numerous
research studies, as a senior project
manager, involving mitigative techniques
for ground-water contamination
associated with severe nuclear
accidents; radionuclide transport
in fractured rock; and integration of
subsurface monitoring and modeling
strategies. He has provided consulting
services to the NRC licensing staff and
NRC Regional Inspectors dealing with
radionuclide releases and environmental
assessments. He co-chairs the Federal
Work Group on Parameter Estimation
and Uncertainty under the Memorandum
of Understanding on Research in
Multimedia Environmental Modeling
(ISCMEM).
He holds a B.S. with Distinction in
geological sciences from Pennsylvania
State University, and a M.S. in
hydrogeology from Stanford University.
He is an active member of the American
Geophysical Union, Geological Society
of America, International Association of
Hydrological Sciences, the International
Hydrogeologic Society, and the National
Ground-Water Association.
robotics or actually using robotics for
some application or another. We started
looking more internationally and found
a lot of international interest in the
technology and, again, applications in
the technology. We started looking at our
own reactor industry here in the United
States and found that some licensees are
also using robotics for some applications.
A few applications are monitoring spent
fuel pools, monitoring for fire-detection
and radiation areas in the plant. So, when
Tom and I were talking, we said this is
something that is in its infancy, even
though it’s being used at a few facilities,
and it’s maybe even hard to imagine 50
years from now what kind of applications
there may be. At the RIC 2016 technical
session on robotics, for example, we
saw crawling robots, swimming robots,
aerial robots. The potential use of robotic
technologies is really wide open. Our
effort to date, in terms of what research
we’re doing, is really fact-finding to try
to establish a baseline of what’s out there
and are there things we should be focused
on that could be used in the future in
the domestic nuclear power industry
here, and it could be other aspects of the
industry, too, like maybe some of the
mining operations or other things that
we regulate. The RIC session provided
summaries from the presentations and
panel discussions at the International
Workshop on the Use of Robotic
Technologies at Nuclear Facilities we co-
hosted at NIST in February, 2016.
The workshop sponsors were both
international and domestic; the U.S.
Department of Energy and Department
of Homeland Security, OECD/Nuclear
Energy Agency, NIST, Canadian Nuclear
Safety Commission, and the United
Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’s
Remote Applications in Challenging
Environments (RACE). We also had
collaborating standards organizations;
American Nuclear Society, ASTM
International, IEEE Robotics and
Automation Society, and the National
Fire Protection Association. We had
the workshop at NIST with special
demonstration of robotics at their Robot
Test Facility. Our next step will be to
assess all that information that we’ve
gathered and what we’ve learned, our
insights from these
interactions
with
other organizations,
other countries. We
need to assimilate
that
information
and come up with a
proposal or a plan
of what the NRC
should do to follow
up on understanding
the use of robotics at
nuclear facilities.
In the future, you
might think, maybe
some licensee under
some circumstance
would use a robot to
do something that
a licensed operator
does today, go into an area, operate a valve
or do something. Well, right now we’re
probably going to have a problem with
that as a regulator because of the operator’s
license. He’s been trained. He knows what
he’s done. He’s practiced it and all those
other things. So how would you substitute
a machine to do that? And would we allow
for that? I don’t think today we would, but
in the future maybe we would.
Nicholson:
Many offices within
the NRC co-sponsored the workshop, so
we’re working with those people to de-
velop a “white paper” examining robot-
ics. It isn’t just NRC’s office of research,
it’s also the licensing offices, as well as
the Office of Nuclear Security and Inci-
dent Response (NSIR). We want involve-
ment by everyone who may have the need
to review the use of robotics at nuclear
facilities, so this is a team effort by all the
NRC staff and those offices.
