July-August 2018 NPJ

36 NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, July-August 2018 Re-Generating Nuclear... ( Continued from page 35) www. NuclearPlantJournal. com consider what beneficial elements might exist within the constraints themselves. Consider how a smaller workforce might be a positive, how the cultural needs and practices of millennials might be a benefit, and how the challenges of nuclear could be made appealing to millennials. Lower Cost May Be an Opportunity, Not a Challenge A smaller workforce would be less costly. Over the years, the size of plant workforces has grown substantially due to a variety of factors. There have been a number of factors at play: the continued reliance on knowledge workers and non- integrated processes and procedures, the prominent “regulated” plant business model which did not stress the limitation of organizational size, the increased complexity of the technical and regulatory environment, and the chronological nature of nuclear events which resulted in highly compartmentalized organizational responses to consequences. Given such a large talent pool, there was no need to pursue “intelligent” technologies which could more effectively perform many of the analytical and decision-making tasks currently performed by plant organizations and personnel. Maybe We Should Think Like Millennials Millennials love speed and the use of technology to address complexity. How could technology be employed rather than the current methods used? For example, one of the most challenging activities occurs during plant outages where safety, compliance and excellent project execution are all managed with extensive long range planning, coordination and a workforce of thousands. Can technologies be employed in the form of already available and in-use solution engines to better manage and direct activities in a faster, more certain and predictable fashion in a real-time environment at a fraction of the manhour and cost commitments expended currently by utility and vendor organizations and their experienced knowledge workers? Might there be new possibilities of optimization now realized by computational engines rather than workers under the press of time and tradition. When issues might be encountered during an evolution, solution sets could be rapidly produced for consideration ranked by costs and risks. Outages could be optimized with integrated costs and time analyses. Such solutions engines also act as integrative tools for knowledge, expertise, rules, and plant configuration, as well as being highly effective “lessons-learned” knowledge systems. An example of such “intelligent technology” available and in use is AMMI Risk Solution’s “PRedictive Intelligent Solutions Modules” © (PRISM) platform, with various applications including outage management and optimization, fire pre-planning, long- range asset planning, capital project cost management, economic risk-informed modelling, and emergency response planning for domestic and international nuclear clients. It has broad applicability to markets outside of the energy market, including healthcare, governmental agencies, transportation, and other industrial and commercial sectors where cost, speed, certainty, and predictability of analysis and decision making in real-time mega-data environments with complex rulesets is critical. Millennials like mobility and challenge. The deployment of technologies new to the industry could represent the very challenges that they seek and with which Baby Boomers struggle. Once these technologies are deployed, turnover of talent becomes a smaller concern as “the knowledge” is now embedded in systems rather than workers. Such technologies could also help ensure that compliance-based performance does not degrade as key knowledge workers leave the industry and are replaced by these highly mobile new employees, while at the same time providing a platform for increasing the knowledge, expertise, and usefulness of the new generation of workers far faster than is possible with existing processes and procedures. The Time for Change is Now The loss of knowledge and expertise due to the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation is a significant issue right now which will only accelerate in the next five to ten years. Immediate actions are needed to capture and package this knowledge and expertise in a way that is easily manipulated and used by smaller staffs of less-experienced workers. Industry policies, processes, and practices need to be reconsidered now to take advantage of the different cultures of the Millennial generation and technologies in order to compete effectively with other industries and sectors in attracting, training, and retaining new employees. Fortunately, technologies such as the PRISM © platform already exist for the first task. It is up to the industry to embrace them and to take the more difficult actions of changing from a “knowledge-based, experience- based” culture to a “technology-based” culture in order to prosper and “re- generate” nuclear power. Contact: Sean Clark, AMMI Risk Solutions, 4451 Briarwood Court South, Annandale, VA 22003; telephone: (571) 419-4385, email: sean.clark@ammirs. com.