Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2016 NuclearPlantJournal.com
39
the e-portal process and the virtual
audits. That’s in place of the “request
for additional information” (RAI) type
of process that we normally use, which
is very lengthy. It usually takes several
rounds of RAIs to get through a process.
Instead, they can put their documents,
even in draft form, on an e-portal that we
can read. We were able to work back and
forth, as they were developing their plans,
to ensure that they were on the right path.
It was at least 40 percent more efficient
in time to do that and it gave us a better
understanding of the plants’ plans. We
also used virtual audits instead of onsite
audits. Rather than having to go out to
the plant to do the audit, which takes a
lot of resources and a lot of their time to
interface with us, we were doing them
virtually online. It didn’t necessarily
remove all onsite audits, because we still
went out and put boots on the ground
when that made sense. But instead of
having to go in person 3-4 times, we
did a lot of them just by having these
interactions with the licensing staff to
audit them and their documentation. So,
we instituted a whole bunch of things
like that in the review of post-Fukushima
requirement implementation that reduced
the regulatory burden of doing this extra
work.
10.
Virtual audit is a new concept, or has
it been there for a while?
The notion of an audit has always
been in our guidance, but the notion
of doing a virtual audit was a further
interpretation on our part. The idea of
using the e-portal process was another
innovation of our existing guidance.
11.
Does the virtual audit include video
and audio feed from the plant, which
NRC can look at and be satisfied?
We didn’t use it to that extent. We
would have information they provided
on the e-portal, and then we would
have a teleconference and they would
talk about that particular information.
That was how far we went with it for
the Fukushima-related work. To ensure
public openness, every month we were
holding joint meetings between the
industry’s Fukushima steering committee
and our Fukushima steering committee,
and we would talk about the things that
were happening in these audits and
in these e-portal sessions. Normally,
if the agency went out to a plant and
did an onsite audit, that typically is not
publicly available. So we went even a
step further to allow the public to have
access and input into what we were doing
in Fukushima-related modifications.
Contact: Scott Burnell, U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, Office of Public
Affairs, Mail Stop O-16D3, 11555
Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD 20852;
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