July-August 2019 NPJ

Nuclear Plant Journal, July-August 2019 NuclearPlantJournal.com 21 Worldwide Collaboration Critical to Innovation By Neil Wilmshurst, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Neil Wilmshurst Neil Wilmshurst is Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer for the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). He has overall management and technical responsibility for $180 million in annual research. Wilmshurst has been on a nuclear site in every continent that has a nuclear plant, none more so than in Japan over the past five years. The 2011 Fukushima event created unique technical needs and a demand for unprecedented collaboration in an industry that already practiced superb teamwork. Wilmshurst joined EPRI in 2003 as a Senior Project Manager in the Plant Support Engineering program. In 2008, he became Director of the Plant Technology department, and was appointed as Vice President and CNO in 2010. Before joining EPRI, Wilmshurst worked in a variety of nuclear utility engineering and maintenance roles with AmerGen at Three Mile Island Unit 1 and British Energy at the Sizewell B plant. Prior to joining the civil nuclear program Wilmshurst served for 13 years in the Royal Navy as a Nuclear Submarine Engineer Officer. A telephone interview by Newal Agnihotri, Editor of Nuclear Plant Journal on June 18, 2019. Global Forum Aims to Overcome Barriers More than 250 nuclear leaders, in- cluding industry stakeholders, regulators, researchers, government representatives and technology providers, participated in a first-of-its-kind global forum in South Korea in June 2019. Attendees devel- oped an action plan for accelerating the deployment of new technical and process solutions to reduce operating costs and enhance nuclear safety for support of global decarbonization with zero-emit- ting nuclear power generation. The fo- rum was organized by the Electric Power Research Institute EPRI), the Interna- ional Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Kingdom’s National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL), he OECD’s Nucle- r Energy Agency OECD/NEA) and Korea Hydro and Nu- lear Power (KHNP), which hosted the vent. . What innova- ive technologies were discussed at the con- ference, which you be- lieve may easily be deployed in the United States or anywhere else in the world? The top four innovations that attendees at the forum prioritized were machine learning to make better use of big data, data analytics and artificial intelligence already available in the nuclear power sector for optimizing maintenance; digital twinning or the virtual re-creation of a process into a computer-based model to improve nuclear plant performance and to reduce costs; advanced manufacturing including 3D printing, to address supply chain challenges; and innovative frameworks for information exchange to increase data sharing on research and development, operations and maintenance. Now the other big discussion attendees were having was whether the industry has a big vision, like a moonshot? We kept asking ourselves, what is the big vision we’re going for? And to get that discussion started off on Day 1 of the forum, we had an astronaut who worked with both NASA and Space X; a leader from the South Korean telecom industry; a CEO of a big data, detection software startup in the (U.S.) Bay Area; the president of TEPCO Research in Japan; and an executive from the UK pharmaceutical industry. There were some really insightful observations that came from those innovators. One was a question of whether the nuclear industry has become completely risk averse and too “afraid to fail.” And is that stifling innovation? The observation from the former astronaut now with Space X was that NASA basically got to the point where they were managing to a completely risk-averse culture and today private companies like Space X are moving faster and with more advanced technology to make the next leap in space. The take- away for the nuclear leaders was perhaps it’s time to embrace the freedom to fail to become successful in deploying innovation. Then we heard we’ve got to create a culture of innovation in nuclear where we leverage the insights from young people and create the right environment to empower technology and process improvements. This gets to machine learning, big data, and eventually artificial intelligence. Think of all the data resident in the global nuclear industry’s operating experience. The nuclear industry is rich with data, but it clearly doesn’t use it as well as other industries do. There was clearly a recognition among attendees that the industry needs to more fully automate processes and analysis, because automation is going to lead to operational efficiencies, safety improvements and cost reductions that will make current plants more reliable and help them extend their operating life. Digital twinning will allow operators to try out things in a virtual plant as opposed to a real plant to help them better understanding how components ( t t a ( c e 1 t (Continued on page 22)