Fukushima
Lessons
Learnt
By Bill Dean, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission.
Bill Dean
Bill Dean is the Director for the Office of
Nuclear Reactor Regulation (NRR). Bill
assumed his duties as the Director on
October 6, 2014.
Prior to this
selection,
Bill served as
the Regional
Administrator
in NRC’s
Region I Office in
King of Prussia, PA,
beginning October
4, 2010. In August
of 2006, he was
appointed to the
position of Deputy
Director of the
Office of Nuclear
Security and
Incident Response.
Bill began his NRC
career in Region II as an operator
licensing examiner in January 1985,
after serving in the U.S. Navy as an
officer in the Navy’s Nuclear Power
Program for over 8 years. He has held
a number of managerial positions of
increasing responsibility within the NRC.
Bill is a 1976 graduate of the University
of California at San Diego where he
earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree
in Applied Physics and Information
Sciences. He also obtained a Masters of
Business Administration from National
University.
An interview by Newal Agnihotri, Editor
of Nuclear Plant Journal, at the NRC’s
Regulatory Information Conference in
Bethesda, Maryland on March 9, 2016.
1.
Do the FLEX connections at the
plants comply with the US NRC criteria?
Many more plants have completed
their outages and determined where they
would put in place the FLEX equipment,
to the degree there’s only a handful of
plants that we have to go out to evaluate
over the course of 2016. We’ve begun
the inspection process now. Jack Davis’s
team, over the past several years, has done
a tremendous job in terms of going out to
every plant in the country and basically
walking through licensees’ plans for
implementing their mitigating strategies.
They’ve given the plants a lot of feedback
and, in some cases,
direction,
where
the plants weren’t
necessarily meeting
what our guidance
was requiring them
to do. Those plants
have
done
the
work to come into
compliance with the
orders. Now we’re
going out to inspect.
So the regional-
based inspectors are
inspecting to verify
and validate that
the licensees have
done exactly what
they told us they
were going to do.
We’ve issued safety
evaluations that say yeah, your plans
make sense.
2.
Was there any impact of FLEX
connections on plant's safety related
equipment?
No, that’s absolutely an important
aspect of what our safety evaluation
was focused on, to not put things
like connections in areas where you
might have an impact on safety-related
equipment. Make sure that where the
connections were made, the paths to
get there, that the pumps and the hoses
would not be impacted or impact safety-
related equipment. All of that was part of
our guidance and what we incorporated
into our safety evaluation to ensure that
the safety-related system did not get
compromised. I would say that in some
cases, licensees had to change their
strategies based on the feedback that they
got from us, and I could even anticipate
that as we go through inspections,
we may find some other issues where
licensees either may have to adjust their
strategies or potentially may even change
a connection point. I think that would be
rarer because I think we did a pretty good
job of making sure where they would put
the connection in places to put the water
in, or in the case of Mark 1’s and Mark
2’s, a hardened vent type effort. That was
something that got a lot of scrutiny from
us.
One of the things that is embedded
into industry strategy, the FLEX strategy,
is the SAFER centers, the center in
Memphis and the center in Phoenix, that
have additional equipment that could be
transported to any site in the country in a
relatively short time frame. The industry
had to make sure that the connections
that they used were universal. In other
words, all the plants would have similar
connections, and so that even a plant
that’s nearby could potentially provide
equipment, if they weren’t affected. That
was a major focus of industries FLEX
effort and something that we certainly
focused a lot of attention on.
3.
Is all the mitigating strategy
effort in place, or are some utilities
still implementing it, and some have
completed it?
The guidance, or the order, said two
refueling outages or no later than 2016.
So there are some plants that are coming
into their second refueling outage, I think,
the 2016 spring. There’s a few in the fall
of 2016. So there will be some plants
that will come to the end of 2016, just
completing their activities. All BWRs or
PWRs are required to implement it.
4.
What is the status of flooding and
seismic evaluations?
I would offer that the flooding area
has been a little bit more challenging
than the seismic area. I think seismic
has been, certainly, more risk-informed
over the years, so I think we were able
to make better progress in identifying the
various seismic challenges that would
exist for some plants and how they
might need to address those, as opposed
to the flooding. The flooding was a lot
34
NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2016
