The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Discover the Reality of the American Nuclear Energy Sector with George Pannell (Part 2) | KEV Talks #32

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

In Discover the Reality of the American Nuclear Energy Sector with George Pannell (Part 2) | KEV Talks #32, George Pannell, an expert in American Nuclear Energy, expertly explains the mechanics of nuclear power plants and the contributing factors to America's nuclear power stagnation and proposes measures to mitigate our dependence on foreign nations for energy.

Hey everybody, thanks for coming back to the KevTalks podcast and in particular this episode 32, the truth about nuclear power, which is part two of my conversation with my dad, George Pernell, who's been in nuclear power for about 50 years. And so we get his history, which includes, you know, going from the U.S. Navy Submarine Service focused on nuclear power plants there, and then into the civilian sector and the difference between a civilian, which is privately owned and a government run and efficiencies that you do or don't lose that way. Also, the truth about what hampered U.S. nuclear power development. And a lot of it, I'll tell you, has to do with that second thing I always say about, you know, stay informed with facts,

not fear of rumors. And fear of rumors negatively impacted our growth in the nuclear power industry and a lot of other countries to get ahead of us. And so now we're dependent on fossil fuels still. So we talk about that a bit and touch on some of the great work that he's done over his five decades in the nuclear power industry. Thanks for being here. Please visit KevTalksPod.com for more information. And let's get into this episode. It's time to lace up, chalk up, get logged in, and get locked on to the KevTalks

podcast. By way of enlightening guest interviews and solo episodes with me, your host, Kevin Pinnell, I will share people's intriguing stories, industry-leading best practice processes, so that team leaders like you can make progress. Thanks for being here. Please subscribe and share the show and go to the KevTalksPod.com website for more information. Now, let's get into this episode in three, two, one. You've done your service in the Navy. You've gotten out, you work for Virginia Power, which is awesome. I think this is just a little before I was born still. Yeah. Niesel was born, but now you're at Virginia Power. But before we get into, because you have so much experience in the nuclear industry now 50 years or so is to provide both me and and the listeners some basics right so to start with can you just touch on like

what is nuclear power when when we hear that term what does that mean yeah let me let me explain it in a way kind of differentiate uh first of all, all electric power is generated the same way in terms of when you heat water to make steam. So the biggest difference is if you're burning coal or burning anything, you have a big building full of tubes, the flame, whatever the source is, gas, coal, is inside this big building. There's a bunch of tubes that run up and down the walls of the building.

They heat the water, turn it to steam, goes to the turbine, makes electricity. You pump the water back through the tubes again to make steam again and so on. So the difference between that and a nuclear reactor is it's one, it's a different heat source. It doesn't burn anything. Fission is a process where you split atoms and you do it at such a high rate that the rods in the in the core that have uranium pellets in them generate heat okay so you you pump water through that core it goes in the bottom picks up maybe 60 degrees from the bottom to the top goes to what we call steam generators which which is like a big tea kettle. So the,

the primary coolant that goes through the core is inside the tubes. Okay. On the outside of the tubes is clean water. It's boiled the steam that goes to the turbine that turns the turbine that makes electricity. So all electricity except for hydro plants is generated by making steam, running it through a turbine, and you take after it goes through the turbine, it's condensed.

That's why you need a river or lake, a cooling tower. It's condensed back into liquid water and pumped back so it can be reheated again. And you have some losses and you have little systems that make up for it, but that's basically the cycle. And the cooling towers are what typically in people's mind a nuclear plant looks like. There's big concrete structures, right? Yeah, hyperbolic towers. Well, some of that's driven by local area issues for the environment, especially over the last few years.

So they force utilities to build towers, even though they might be sitting right next to a river or a lake. So you need that water. The condenser is the device where the steam that goes through the turbine exhaust into that box. And it's a bunch of tubes that the cooling water runs through. So it could be river water, could be lake water, could be cooling tower water. It then turns the steam back into liquid so the pumps can pump it back to the steam generator whatever's generating the steam back to the boiler it's got the flame in it created by coal or gas or back to the steam generator generators in a nuclear plant to be

boiled again and make steam and so it's a closed cycle either way. So the stuff coming out of that is vapor, not smoke, right? If you see anything coming out of a nuclear plant, it's not smoke, it's not a smokestack. Like a cooling tire? Yeah. It's a cloud. It's cold. It's highly moisturized air comes out the top of the cooling tire

and it hits cold air and makes a cloud it's not radioactive it's not anything it's not smoke there's not that air on tv coming out right it's not smoke now so yeah what's the difference between that and a coal or a gas plant then well nothing nothing except for the heat source they have to cool the condenser the same way, turn the steam back into liquid, pump it back to where the flame is so it can heat it back up to steam. So they might have a cooling tower.

They might use a river directly. They might use a lake, whatever. Works the same way. So the heat cycle was the same. It's just a matter of what generates the heat. Now, the big difference is there's no combustion process with a nuclear reactor. So that's a completely closed loop.

So the water goes through the bottom of the core, comes out, gains about 60 degrees, go to the steam generators. There's multiple steam generators. Gives up some of that heat to the water on the outside of the tubes which makes steam then it comes back to the bottom of the reactor goes through there so there's no combustion products going out of a nuclear apartment zero whereas a place that burns stuff, there's stuff going out the top of that three or four story building where the flame is. It's a combustion process. Yeah.

You've seen the big stacks that coal and whatever plant burns stuff. Well, the reason they're so high again, that's environmental regulation. The higher you can put the stack, the more they're so high, again, that's environmental regulation. The higher you can put the stack, the more dispersion you get. So better for the environment, right? So you don't see any stacks. The cooling tower is not a stack. There's no exhaust stacks coming out of a nuclear power plant.

Which I think is probably a misconception, right? Like, hey, there's just stuff pouring out of there but it's just clouds yeah happy little tmi when the when uh walter cronkite was on tv they always had the cooling tower behind the behind him right and i know people sitting at at home were saying oh look at that radioactivity code yeah it wasn't radioactivity it's just the cloud right you know and that's um and what year was tmi again it's 1979 march 79 so so a few years after you got out and we'll get there in a second but the um so there there already are so really there is there is directly immediately more there's pollution coming out of coal plants and anything else that burns but not nuclear power plants no right there is no combustion exhaust listen big difference yeah no combustion exhaust out of a nuclear power gotcha now that now that the difference on waste i guess is between

let's say use coal just because that's the majority right that's you know a big talk now of it comes it comes out now whereas for a power plant, you have to package the waste to make sure it's sealed up in different ways and then go store it somewhere. Well, no. The waste we're talking about is fuel that's been used in the reactor. Each refueling, which is about every 18 months, you change about a third of the core. Gotcha. So picture this so you put the the fuel that burns up the quickest is kind of toward the center of the core so when you refuel you take that those

fuel assemblies out of the center of the core move the next set in and you put new ones around the outside. So now you got fuel assemblies that can go radioactive again, fission, generate heat, so on. So after about three cycles, the entire core has been changed now. Wow. And then all you do is you take that fuel. There's a great big pool building with a pool in it because there's so much radioactivity in that fuel assembly that the radioactivity uh the radioactive fuel still heats the metal you know the fuel assembly is about 13 feet tall it's got about 200 and some fuel rods in it and those fuel rods are filled with uranium pellets.

So after it's been in that core, it's extremely radioactive. Radioactive radioactivity is energy, right? Right. So if you didn't have it in water, those tubes, again, even without being in the reactor and being critical, would heat up to an extreme temperature. Gotcha. So that's why you being in the reactor and being critical would heat up to an extreme temperature gotcha so that's why you sit in the pool so the basic cycle is the waste we're talking about is spent fuel assemblies right they go into a big swimming pool in racks they sit there about

five years and then you can put them into what we call spent fuel storage casks and there are metal ones and there are concrete ones and basically the fuel by that time the radioactivity has died off to the point where they can be cooled sufficiently by putting them in this cask of whatever makeup it is metal or concrete or whatever sit in open air in a pad and still get cold enough. Gotcha. Does that make sense? So it doesn't get hot, yeah. When you initially put them in, they're so hot.

You have them for five years so that radioactivity, eventually it dies off. I mean, it's not gone, but it gets down to a point where you can take it out of water put it in a dry container and it will still if the container is designed properly because the nrc has to approve them the heat will come out of the container to the air and the water is you just sit them on a big concrete pan and water cools it and it just no there's there is no water cooling oh no no once you put it in that it's dry you put sorry no i mean when they're put in the pool in those racks initially

water itself is is able to cool the spent fuel and contain it because it can't it doesn't leak out through the the water and it's radioactive shield right So there's about 40 feet of water over those fuel assemblies. So both the volume, it does get recirculated. And it has heat exchangers. But it both cools it and it shields the radioactivity from coming out of the pool. Wow. So you can work around the edge of the pool. No kidding.

That's the idea. That's pretty amazing. And the way they get it there so when you take it out of the reactor there's what they call transfer tube so you take a given fuel assembly and that's all done underwater you put it in this little fuel transfer device so you do it vertically you put it in the device and you lay it down. It's like a little trolley. Then it goes through that tube over the spent fuel pool. Then they upright it, take the fuel out, put it in the rack, done.

That's how that works. Yep. It's kept underwater all that time. Gotcha. Yep. And you mentioned the NRC and we've talked about doe so that's nuclear regulatory commission right and then there's a department of energy how do they what role do those two agencies play in in is it commercial and public well that they play a role

in generally speaking uh department of energy deals deals with legacy facilities that may have made, like Hanford, they were involved in making the initial atomic bomb, right? Okay. So to do that, you need to operate reactors to create certain fission products that go into a bomb. But the process of extracting those fission products is kind of chemically based. So you only extract certain isotopes and all the other stuff you have to use to extract it. That's a lot of the waste that's out at Hanford.

They threw it in tanks out there so all that stuff that was used to extract the vision or the isotopes you needed is in tanks uh and there's like 56 million gallons of it oh wow so that's the worry out there that's why they're built they're trying to get this project i'm working on going the idea is is to capture that stuff in glass so it can't get to the environment so you're capturing glass poured into a stainless steel container put a lid on the container and go sit it on a pad somewhere so i guess what what relationship does department of so when you say department of

energy is responsible for legacy systems just in general the nuclear industry are they an oversight body or are they well no doe is kind of its own regulator if you will and that that that uh causes some initial problems they have some test reactors, like the trigger reactor, and those reactors usually don't run at power. The old Hanford ones did to generate the isotopes you need, but they do it for experiments and that sort of stuff. So the reactor just pulses and then it shuts down. It doesn't sit there and generate electricity or anything like

that. But a lot of the times the DOE is its own regulator. And my experience with that is it's, they don't quite operate the same as the commercial business with the NRC oversight. And what's, and so, so you mentioned the nrc again so what the nuclear regulatory commission are they then the the body over commercial yes well they and they have jurisdiction over some other things like medical uh okay isotopes where you have i have radioactive stuff to treat patients and stuff. They regulate that kind of stuff too. So basically, the NRC, when you go to build a nuclear power plant,

you present the design to them. They have to approve the design because you're making the case that if I build this kind of reactor with this, these safety systems, it's safe to operate this thing. And they give you a license. First of all, they give you a construction permit based on, well, it looks like this is a viable design.

So you can start moving dirt, but you're doing it at risk. There's no guarantee that they're gonna give you an operating license so they don't approve the whole thing all at once well no but you gotta think about it that's a risk yeah and when you start moving dirt you're burning money real fast right okay so you're hoping you can get all that design approved and get your tech specs so you can run the place. Right. Right.

So that's a big deal. So you write what they call a safety analysis report that describes the reactor, what its power level is going to be, all the safety systems. Right. Safety injection, containment, research spray system blah blah blah and the whole objective is to show that the reactor design and all the safety systems will adequately protect the environment and the public okay that's that's the entire goal and genesis of a safety analysis report so you go back and forth for years you present the design they ask questions well what about this what about that well and it goes on and on so the worst thing you can do is not have the plant fully designed and then start moving dirt

and then find out down the road when you're burning about two million dollars a day you've got issues you've got to go back to the nrc right that translates into this is going to take a lot longer than you thought and you're burning two million dollars a day so that's a big difference in um you know, in the, it sounds like in the nuclear industry, say in IT and healthcare IT, just, you know, generically when we do projects or programs, right? For us, we can have a general idea, do kind of a basic charter and go, Hey, what do you think? Here's what we're pretty sure we're going to do. It'll cost about this much. And then a little bit down the road, we'll do like a full kind of scope document where we get into the details, but it sounds like you're not doing that in nuclear industry.

Like you got to know upfront how it's going to work. What's that? There's no kind of agile iterative process going on with a nuclear plant. No. And so at the end of the process, you, you finally write what they call a final FSA or we call it final safety analysis report. OK, chapter 15, for example, of that report is all the transient analysis that says if we have a steam line break, here's what happens. Here's why the core is still safe. Here's when safety injection activates. And and you basically show that you can keep the core below a certain temperature

limit, like 2000 degrees at the surface of the, of the tubes, fuel tanks, right? Fuel pins. So you go through that. I have a, then I have a feed water break. That's the line that sends water back to the steam generator to make steam. Right? Well, if you lose that, now you're losing part of your heat removal capability. So you got to show that's okay. Then if you have a, what they call a loss of coolant accident,

that means you've analyzed for some pipe in the main coolants, in the main reactor system breaking. Now you got a hole in the, in the main coolants in the main reactor system breaking now you got a hole in the in the main reactor system and usually the the safety analysis argument is the safety injection system can make up for the largest pipe break and still keep again keep the core below a certain temperature. So you have to have contingency plans built in ahead of time also. Well, yeah, but I mean, the basic safety systems have to perform, which didn't happen at TMI. They initially did, but then the operator shut them off.

Gotcha. Okay, so you got to get water to that core yeah you got to do that or you got a big problem like tmi it's a big problem so you're basically telling the story as to why the systems you've designed for the worst case event you can postulate which nrc agrees is probably the worst case event, the core is still okay. Gotcha. I mentioned that because for, again, the project management world, you kind of as needed and some upfront, we did it way more. It's closer to me like when I would do public safety incident planning.

Yeah. Right. We did contingency plan upfront. There's a bomb, mass casualty, it's too hot, whatever. Probably because of the nature of that business, probably similar to nuclear power of the nature of the business. You screw up and people die. In the plant-verse, say we're putting software in,

and not that it can't have impact, especially in healthcare IT, but we don't always vet out a contingency plan way ahead of time, before go live for sure. But that early, like in the process you're talking about, although honestly, I wrote that down because wouldn't it be great to game that out super early and say, hey, let's go through this. What if this fails while we're putting the software?

Yeah, there you go. I would say I'm guessing, but I would say the closest analogy to what we were just talking about is some of the software you do really doesn't endanger patients. But you had an operation that was done by a robot. Yeah. Right. So I imagine before the people approved using that machine. Oh, yeah. It had to go through a lot of same kind of thing.

Think about it. So you're going to use this machine to work on people. Right. Right. And you're going to run it with software. Now I don't know who does the FDA do that or who does that? Do you think. That certifies the robotic machine like that?

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. I'm sure they're in there somewhere. I should ask at work. And for folks listening, I had kidney cancer removed in 09 from, I had the robotic surgery. Yeah. Which was pretty amazing.

The DaVinci. Yeah. So pretty, pretty awesome. Shout out Dr. Hampton. Two things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah. See, that's different than the software, your software you just install at the children's facility that alerts you if a child's being moved. Yeah. Well, that's an important thing. But the child's not going to die because of that. That's going to really happen to people. I mean, it's a good thing to know. But that robot whole different when it has made an incision and it's inside a person. Yeah. I mean, a little different. An infant intrusion, you know, or basically it's an alarm system for somebody trying to steal. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's tough. But but yeah, when when you're doing that, that's a great point. But yeah, so to to try and capture, like I mentioned, kind of all your experience. And we kind of talked about some, some key points by the decades.

And we were talking about the seventies and three mile Island and, you know, touched on some of the things that went wrong there, but want to talk about some of the key things that you've been involved in, in your, you know, five decades of that. And in the seventies, one thing that we touched on was, and was a lesson learned, think, from through my island and just realized there's so many controls and it's you can't remember all of them. They're all over. They're maybe not in the best place because, hey, look, there's an open spot. Put a knob there. And so you and a doctor looked at human factors. Right. How do we make this thing?

So it's essentially kind of like we've touched on in it reverse engineering something which isn't the optimal way to do it but you all had to do that for the right reasons what was the can you can you kind of summarize the process that you all did to enable human factors into a pretty technical layout of a nuclear plant yeah well while the one of the real serious problems was if you were going to do it, I'll just say properly, you would design that board from the ground up that way. So now here we're faced with a board that everybody's been trained on. And right across the room, there are guys operating a reactor at 100 percent power. Same board. And I'm over there going to mess with it. So if you were going to properly apply human factors, you would start from the get go.

Right. And put those kind of features in. But we had to retrofit and we couldn't fix everything. Right. I mean, it's just physically impossible and think all the guys that were running they're running the reactor across the room because they're the control boards at north end and surrey they're all in one big room there's no wall separating the control boards the guys can see one another and they can hear another and all that stuff so the guys that were operating unit one were basically going to roll their chairs over there and operate the board that I just messed with. So there was some obvious retraining involved. But the changes weren't that drastic. But the best we could do was enhance what was there.

We couldn't fix it all. For example, one of the best examples was a safety system, which is important to cooling the reactors, what we call the auxiliary feed water system. So if the normal feed system that sends water to the steam generator, like I mentioned, to make steam, the auxiliary feed water system is used to get water to the generator to take energy out of the core you're not worried about making steam anymore you just need a heat

sink because you can blow the steam generator to the environment okay so you just need a heat sink you need a way to suck the heat out of the core gotcha and that's what auxiliary feed water is for. So on the control board, North Atlanta has three steam generators, Alpha, Bravo, and Charley. So they have a set of controls for each of those generators that you can use to run those pumps to make sure water gets to each of those generators right so the original layout of the board there was part of the auxiliary feed water system here and you go down the border a little ways and there were switches for what we what we call a flash evaporator which you could care if that thing fell out of the building and then below that were some more

auxiliary feed water switches so right in the middle of the auxiliary feed water system were switches for a thing that just makes the relevant gotcha yeah it's a real so obviously what we did and one there there are two electric pumps in the aux feed system and one steam driven one. So it's important to know if you got steam line pressure for the steam driven pump, right? Well, that meter was on the vertical board up by where the electro hydraulic control indicators were. Not right in front of you? No. So now if you go to that board, a steam generator is here on the left.

It's the steam, steam driven pump. That meter is right there. And you can see that. And it goes A, B, C, the flash evaporator. We moved completely out of the way up to the top of the board. So everything that's grouped there now is all auxiliary feed water. There's nothing in between them and they're a alpha bravo charles and the steam pressure meter is right on the bench board now where the control for the steam driven pump is and imagine some of those movements or labels you you got there from the it was it was a it's like a human behavioral specialist, right?

Well, that color things and doctor. Yeah. Dr. Silberman, they actually get trained in, I mean, they study human behavior, especially in stressful situations. Gotcha. So his experience in applying human factors that he had the expertise in was doing fighter cockpits. Right. Because that's a little stressful, right? So you got to know, you got to know where all the switches are. You got to be able to recognize the difference between them. Yeah. And you're, you're in a kind of a stressful environment when you're trying to shoot somebody. So that was his

expertise or his experience, not his expertise. He had never seen a nuclear power plant before. Gotcha. So I taught him in the process of doing this, how a nuclear power plant works. And he taught me how to the extent we could enhance things that were already there. Gotcha.

Couldn't cut the board down to the base and start over. So we thought of ways to, like auxiliary feed water, that definitely was a benefit. It's easier to understand where the switches are and they're all organized properly and so on and so forth. And then

because the control went north and south, they have a bench section, then there's about a three-foot space. You can actually walk behind the bench and it's served. They have a bench section. Then there's about a three foot space. You can actually walk behind the bench and there's a vertical section. And the basic layout is most of the controls are on the bench, like for starting pumps and that sort of stuff.

And the indicators for systems, pressure, temperature flows are on the vertical board. So the way the board was built there are a set of controls that are kind of grouped like for the primary coolant system that got the reactor coolant pump switches and a lot of other switches related to the primary system the water that's involved with the reactor gotcha and then on the vertical board, there's pressurizer level. That's the device that pressurizes the system to 2,235 pounds. There's other flow in the reactor cooling system. And so what we did in those cases is we shaded that area that encompassed all the switches

related to the reactor cooling system and did the same thing on the vertical board. So right now, all switches that are associated with primary coolant are surrounded by gray. The whole area is like gray. However, the story about, oh, we need a space to put a switch. When you go through that process, you find what Gene referred to as nested controls. In other words, it's a gadget in there. It doesn't belong there.

So sure enough, in the reactive coolant system, if you look at the board right now, there's highlighted switches that say, this has nothing to do with the primary colonists. They know what it does, but it stands out now. It's not like fairy because the board's all one color. And it was the key to the key to that. Basically, visual cues, visual color groupings and visual labels that just make it obvious.

These are for this and all these colors do the same thing. So we went around the board. So there's a section that has rectal and then vertical section with indicators associated with that. Then you move to your right. It's the balance of plant stuff, the steam generator stuff, levels, pressures, steam flow, feed pump controls, same thing. So you highlight that and there's a set of indicators on the vertical board

associated with the steam part of the plant. Gotcha. So we did the same thing. So we were right. And what we didn't want to do, I've seen some recent pictures. I think they screwed it up. We put subtle colors in. So the thing didn't look like grandma's quilt.

Right. So we might've done a dark gray for primary coolant and a lighter gray or some shade of that for the balance of plant stuff and we differentiated whether it was secondary plant stuff from primary we put a black border around the primary okay so it not only had a slightly different color it had a border around it whereas the steam plant we didn't put a border i i saw some recent pictures of the north attic control board and i think i think the primary coolant system is bright blue or something now so baby it doesn't it doesn't look right i'm sure it differentiates but

we didn't want to make it look like grandma's quilt. Right. Well, the hardest thing we had to do, the NRC insisted on, I think I mentioned it to you yesterday, say once a shift, to verify all the lamps for indicators that indicated safety system performance, whether it was valve position or pump status or whatever. And turn those lights on. And verify the bulbs are working. Well, there's hundreds of those things. And some of them are on the bench. Some of them are on the vertical board.

And they're not all segregated. There's other lights interspersed with the ones you're concerned with. So those didn't necessarily equate to a value add indicator. Well, I mean, it's good to know whether the indicator is working uh but what that meant to us was i had to go into every remember we had tested the plant verified all the control systems i had to go in and touch every control system and figure out a way to light those lights and not invalidate the safety analysis report or make that safety function non-functional again. If somebody pushed a button, did I just defeat the safety injection system?

Because if a pump were running, for example, in our nomenclature, when a pump's running, the red bulb's on. There's three bulbs, red, amber, green. But when that pump's running, I had to turn on the other two bulbs without tripping the breaker, causing a fault somewhere, defeating the functionality of the safety injection system, whatever. So imagine that task so i think i guess does that equate to kind of a regulatory body or someone just adding undue overhead uh yes

gosh i'm trying i mean in summary but think about the timing okay so here's three mile island right there's all these reports that say there's human factors issues with the board you're not in a position to to fight arm wrestling right so think of the condition of north end of two at the time when three mile island happened we had already been through hot functional testing that means what that test is you heat the primary up we use rack the coolant pump energy to take it up to temperature the core isn't in yet it's not working but you can make steam enough steam to to actually run the main turbine for about five minutes there's enough heat capacity there right so that's hot functional test you're testing getting the system up to temperature actually making steam spinning the turbine up all that

stuff okay okay so once you're through that the nrc agrees that your testing is adequate you're ready to load fuel oh so that's where we were. So I wasn't about to argue. Right. Yeah. And neither was management at Virginia fire said, George, for now, we'll just have to fix this. We'll just get it, make it work. And, and guess what? This was the first.

So I really wasn't too worried because it was the first time the nrc had seen an in-place upgraded control oh wow so i figured if we did enough to impress them right it'd be fine which you know which is a great point it was between you know the way you just said it uh for other folks you know you know i apologize basically sometimes you get orders you get guidance you get whatever that you know you just know right off the bat it's not going to be helpful but you also know team we have to do this yeah so we're going to do it well yeah and we're going to do it to the best of our ability well the other bad thing they did is on the board of what they call manual auto control stations.

What they are, it gives you a way, say you want to control a steam valve that releases steam to the environment. So that controller has got a little meter on it, and it's got push buttons. And so the operators learn that when the indicator that will meter goes up that means the valve is opening so if that valve is opening they know what the valve is it's releasing steam to the atmosphere which should bring the pressure in the steam generator down right so the nrc insisted that that meter had to mirror what the end product was supposed to be in other words they wanted the meter to go down to indicate you're lowering steam

pressure now if that didn't screw up the operator's minds we fortunately we had enough near misses i i that that one i did try to argue about yeah say they're they know what this valve is doing they know what the end results going to be you shouldn't and well that was another one we lost for a while but then we came back and had a few near misses and kind of told them we, we really need to put these back. Yeah. We need to put these back where they were and they didn't argue with us. So, so that, that one, again, you had to bite the bullet and say, okay, I hope we don't do anything too bad, but this is really going to mess with the mind of the doctors because they

knew exactly, they've been trained for hours and hours and hours knew the plant backwards and forwards and what that valve was doing yeah they knew what the signal meant the signal going up meant the signal going to the valve was making the valve go up right which it resulted in the steam pressure going down because they were dumping steam to that yeah i mean i was just another great example if you do it and how you you and your team decided you know what this is this is the time we we have to give that feedback up the chain of command yeah oh yeah and and not be worried about doing it because it's not just helping you all like it's going

to help them and once they realize like hey this is actually screwing things up well think about again if you keep in sight the overall goal yeah it's reactor safety right yeah all of us nrc operating crew everybody that owns that nuclear plant our mission is reactor safety yeah we generate electricity right that's our that's our goal regardless of what logos on your shirt yeah yeah it's the same thing i mean and that's our, that's our goal. Our list of what logos on your shirt. Yeah. Yeah. It's the same thing. I mean, and that's similar, you know, I've run into, which is good. And it's hard to do whether you're a team member or team leader, whatever is tell the executive or the,

or the governing body that gave you this guidance. And imagine that after three mile Island, right. And the media is going crazy and they want over correction and this and that, but, but even, even in projects to say, you know what boss sponsor, business owner, whomever we talk about it, we can probably do it, but here's how much more it's going to cost in time or money or mistakes to that point, or it's going to actually not increase the safety. It's going to, it sounds like decrease the safety, right? Which that's right. You know,

it's easy to, I think it's easy for folks after, cause it happens it happens now right now it's shootings before it was planes and it was hurricanes like it's an overcorrection buy all the stuff do all these things uh well i always read uh you know there's always good write-ups and summaries on uh catastrophic events like the challenger i don't know if you remember the challenger. It blew up, right? Yeah, I was watching that. So here's this meeting, and it's an unusual day in Florida, but it's cold. And the engineers are telling the people that want to launch this thing,

the O-rings are too cold. You should not fire up this rocket. The O-rings are too hard. They won't seal like they ought to seal. And guess what? They got overridden by the group think, and we got to make this schedule. We killed a bunch of people.

Bottom line. So the problem we run into in those situations is afterward the senior folks come and say well why weren't you more adamant about that well think about the psychology yeah the guy's only guy or woman's only going to be so adamant they still got to keep their job. Right. Right. Unless they're willing to say, I'm out of here. Right.

You guys are making it. Very few people do that. I'm sorry to say. Because they were just based on their knowledge saying, this is not a good idea. They couldn't say, it will absolutely blow up the rocket. Right. They couldn't say it will absolutely blow up the rocket. Right. They couldn't say that. Right.

So the group think started and boom, off it went. Yeah. That's a great point too, is as much as you should say it again, when you're thinking this job pays for my house and feeds my family. That's it. You think of psychology

of groups like that that are responsible for uh things that can affect the safety of other people right it's not a good situation sometimes no so let's go we're still in the 70s we're talking about great great stuff yeah let's just touch on in the 80s so we start to get into both everybody and then particularly the nuclear this some data-driven stuff right computing's coming up more and oh yeah a little more modern um and we we touched on some you know some systems that you have particularly with there was a disaster at surrey or disaster i guess there's an? Disaster to folks that died for sure. And folks affected. But a positive, I guess, if you will, out of that is you and some other folks had put in the time to get systems in place where you could read what was happening,

not just during that, but before and after it to be able to troubleshoot. And so can you, can you kind of touch on the value of that ability to drive data? And particularly you mentioned like this is real data, not simulation data. All right. Well, the thing, let me help with perspective a little bit. So you have a operating crew at the plant, right? You have an engineering staff. And then for off-normal events,

you have a corporate emergency response team, right? And also, NRC has a corporate emergency response team. So if there's an event at the plant, we man our corporate emergency response. They man theirs. And the system that we put together because of tmi sent data to the nrc too so they could see real-time plant conditions okay so so the value was we could sit in innsbruck at the innsbruck Emergency Response Center. A part of what came out of TMI was there were too many cooks in the kitchen. The crew's trying to save the reactor, and there's people telling them this and telling them that, and more experts show up, blah, blah, blah.

Right. So part of the concept that came out of the write ups about that accident was we need a better way to be able to see what's going on in the plant, but not drive the operating crew crazy. That's great. Yeah. Interfere with what they're trying to do. They're busy enough without folks poking their nose in there that think they know what they're doing. Right. So we could literally sit in the Innsbruck Technical Emergency Center. And I was the advisor at that time to the VP of Nuclear Operations, Mr. Stewart. And I had all the technical guys under me, engineering, health physics, all those sort of folks. So we could sit there and because of the system we put together,

we could tell what was going on in the plant. We could see what was happening. We could see if they were cooling the reactor down okay and all that sort of stuff. And we didn't have to bug the control room. Right. The only reason we would bug the control room was if we thought we saw something abnormal.

An example of that at Surrey, not so much. We got the report about the fire suppression systems and all that, but that's not monitored on the computer. That's just something that happened in the plant. But at North Anna, when we had the tube rupture in July of 87, again, they had to cool the reactor down. And the system you use to cool it down is what they call the residual heat removal system. It's just a little cooling loop, if you will, with heat exchangers that pump water through the reactor. The heat exchanges are cooled

by component cooling water. So you're sucking heat out of the reactor with a different source of water, basically. But to put that system in service, there's one suction line with two series valves in it. And then the discharge of the system is two lines going to two different loops. So if can picture the north anna reactors have three loops so two of the discharge lines go to say alpha and bravo loop a suction line say comes from charlie loop and that suction line has two series valves in it well by procedure to put that system in service you're supposed to cycle one at a time those suction valves to make sure they're working before you open them both because you might need to close them right if

something's wrong when you pressurize the system okay and so we were watching and we saw one of the valve cycle they're 1700 oh one and oh two i think it's the valve numbers anyway they cycled one and all of a sudden we saw flow in the rhr system we never saw the other valve cycle so mr stewart gets on the phone he's got that procedure right in front of him right yeah hey we didn't see you guys because the nrc is watching all this right we didn't see you guys cycle that vet oh we're god we should have told you guys that valve has a broken limit switch it's been that way for a while we need to fix it well first of all mr stewart wasn't real happy about that, but he said, okay, I got you. Just as long as we didn't, as long as we follow a procedure, that's good. Well, on the other situation in that particular event, that's the one that had the steam generator tube rupture.

That means one of the tubes in the steam generator broke in half. So now you're shooting reactor water into the steam generator that's supposed to have clean water so that radioactive water you got a hole in the primary system basically yeah it's going in the steam generator so the the remedy to that for the time uh was you depressurize the reactor coolingant system, try and equalize it with a steam generator, which is around 800 pounds. And it kind of slows down putting reactor coolant into that vessel. Right.

Then you bottle up the faulted steam generator. I mean, you just close it off, valve it off. Now all that radioactive water from the primary system is isolated, captured. Yeah, it's radioactive, but it's captured in that vessel, right? And here's where the regulation and organizations and what I call shade tree lawyer thinking comes in so the criteria for declaring you're in cold shutdown and the reason you need to understand the reason for these things is you cool the reactor plant down to the point where it can't make steam so that you can open the containment dome so you got rules that say hey if the reactor cooling system is above this temperature

you can't open the containment because something might break and that stuff go out to the environment. Not good, yeah. So cold shutdown has a defined set of temperatures and pressures and all that stuff

and have an RHR and service stuff. However, comma, we got down to that point on the other two loops that were operating, right? Well, the faulted steam generator couldn't cool down. It wasn't getting feed water. There was no steam being released.

So there we sat. Two loops were at conditions for declaring you were a cold shutdown. But there sat a steam generator at 400 pounds pressure with the radioactive fluid in so are you really in cold shutdown so being meaning you met specifications that didn't necessarily well if you want to play shade tree lawyer yeah you could say well the other two loops are meet tax breaks but the basis for being in cold shutdown is you don't have a source of steam that can release radioactive material right well there's a big old source what do you got you

got a great big old steam generator sitting at 400 pounds pressure right yeah it's bottled up and bill was going to declare we were in cold shutdown and I went over and whispered in his ear. I said, Bill, here's what I think we ought to do. So I got the HP tax and guys, because they could take a grab sample of what was in the concentration of radioactivity in the generator. I said, guys, I want to calc. Now, the limit of radiation at the site boundary, my license was 100 milliliter per hour. Okay. Gotcha. That's a site boundary dose limit.

So I said, I want you to assume we blow away all the inventory in that generator. Tell me what the site boundary dose is. They did that calc and they came back and says, I think we're okay, George. It's like 50 MR. I said, nope. Then I went back over to they came back and said, I think we're okay George, it's like 50 MR. I said, nope. Then I went back over to Mr. Stewart and said, okay. It was not the time

to play shade tree lawyer. Because if you understood the basis for what cold shutdown meant, you really were not in cold shutdown. So you want to know based on ground truth, not what the checklist says, like what's really happening there.

You know what I mean? That's why for tech specs, one of the things I had instilled or installed in technical specifications when they reworked them, because the guy that was on that committee, I was on the reactor trip committee. I encouraged him to offer to be chairman of the tech spec improvement subgroup for obvious reasons, because I had a lot to say.

Yeah. But so we needed to improve tech specs. And the thing I directed him to do, I said, look, we don't want any more tech specs without the basis explained. We've got to quit treating operators like mushrooms, keep them in the dark and feed them BS, right? If they better understand why we even have that tech spec, they'll more effectively implement it. So now there's a section of the tech specs that didn't used to exist. And it's the basis. Why, what does safety injection have to do? How does it have to do it?

Why do we have it? And then it's for every other thing in there. So the basis section of the tech specs now is as thick as probably thicker than the tech specs. It explains every spec and why you have to meet it, what the design basis is, why it's important to keep it in service, blah, blah, blah. That's a huge, I mean, what you know, and just having good teams that trust you. And, you know, one, they know you call their leaders intent, right?

What's the task purpose and end state of all this stuff? And then, as you know, the why, right? If people know the why, we can figure out the how. And that's a huge, that's, you know, like step one and good change management is folks know why we're doing this. Right. And they know you support it and all that good stuff. You know, my experience is if I know the why, then the what sticks in my brain better. Yeah. Because I understand the basis.

Oh, yeah. Right. I get it. But if you just tell me do this because i said so right that doesn't work it doesn't work people don't want to be treated like they're stupid no that's what i mean especially in that field to your point where they're not right like that's well we did that for years to operate so part of that uh task also i said look you because we work with westinghouse you know these are westinghouse

textbooks and stuff said look i want you guys to go out you're committed to go out and talk to at least 10 operating crews from around the country and have them tell you what kind of issues they have with textbooks because they got to run the plant by these things yeah so if they're ambiguous it makes their life miserable because when they're operating they got to make judgments on whether they need to shut the plant down and so if a tech spec is fuzzy the the decision is fuzzy right right what should i do i know my interpretation of this is X. Right. When in fact, it really means Y. We shouldn't have any of those. Not when you're operating a nuclear reactor. You can't do that.

So is that when you get into so you're using data driven at Virginia Power, but then you also got into operational performance and safety was that part of that initiative where you were trying to really help improve not just where you were but synergy in the nuclear industry really right across the country to go yeah hey we're all on the same team we're all working toward the same stuff um and then you know gonna share and you can elaborate on this of helping to get where using data and better specs and stuff like that went from um you know again you would have trips uh or you'd be up what 65 of the time and then and then it was you're up 93 of the time so a huge increase and not yeah and reactor trips are a rarity now all across the country they very seldom have a reactor trip they go 18 months put new fuel in do it again so did you see when you sent those folks out did they come back with some obvious patterns oh yeah oh yeah so all this started in 85 85 just as a refresher tmi happened in march of 79 so we're six years down the road gotcha

and we're having the kind that kind of reactor performance. Wow. One and a half reactor trips a day, 65% capacity factors. And you're going, oh. We're going to, eventually we're going to revisit control room designs,

operator training. And the other problem with it is, I guess the best analogy I can explain is, if you had a Mercedes Ben benz and you were doing testing and you had this road straight road and it was wet run it down that road a hundred times at 100 miles an hour and slam on the brakes and every time it should stay in a straight line right well that's the theory right well 20 of the time reactors didn't stay in a straight line something went

wrong a pump didn't start a valve didn't open and close like it was supposed to so now you got the nrc and the dig in well why'd that happen that's not supposed to did you not do right maintenance are you guys not maintaining the plant do you not know how to keep this thing going see that's where the corrective action system comes in so an example we got dinged on the north on the north end of tube rupture because uh so we're getting getting the reactor cooled down the steam generator is all bottled up we got all that issue solved but outside the control room on a platform by the condenser there was a radiation monitor that was supposed to monitor an exhaust pipe that comes from the

condenser to let you know if you have a tube rupture because that it's called a air ejector so the air ejector sucks on the condenser because you run the condenser at sub-atmospheric pressure in other words it's in a vacuum right and if that sensing device the radiation detector saw radioactivity which is supposed to be an indicator you got a tube rupture right radioactivity shouldn't be in that flow path it's supposed to redirect the exhaust from that inductor from atmosphere to the containment to make sure none of that goes it probably probably wouldn't hurt anybody, but that was a design. It goes from exhausting that steam,

the atmosphere to redirecting it into the containment. So while the RC guys is walking up the pathway to the control room, he sees an auxiliary operator come out of the control room, go over to that rad monitor and pull the fuses. Well, they knew that if they pulled the fuses and killed that monitor, it would swap over the valve from atmosphere to the containment. And why did they have to pull the fuses?

Well, you go in a corrective action system and it says, you know, this darn sensing line keeps filling up with condensate because it's coming off a line with steam in it. And so the rad monitor is blind. It was

in the corrective action system for two years. So now we had a super performance in the control room with a design basis tube rupture. The operating crew did phenomenal. They had the thing bottled up in 30 minutes. The reactor was cooling down.

And what did we get done? Something we should have fixed. Two years old. The NRC watched it happen. Oh, gotcha. So that's one of those things. Well, this isn't important. It's just a rad monitor.

And it just detects the first radioactivity in that pipe and makes sure it gets redirected into the containment building. Well, somebody, the culture of development says, well, that's not really important, is it? It's just a little radioactivity. That's not the point. Right. It's designed to automatically redirect that stuff

in a containment building and you guys let it go for two years. And then you got busted. Not acceptable. Right. Not acceptable. So anyway, so 85, six years after TMI, we're having all these problems. So I actually volunteered.

We were in a meeting in Atlanta, and we're sitting around the table, and there's all these utility representatives. I was one. I was a director at the time at Virginia Power. Had responsibility for both Surrey and North Anna and the independent safety engineering group. And people were arguing about whether we needed to fix the problem.

Wow. When I came in that room, knowing what I knew, I said, I don't even understand why we're arguing about this. We need to fix the problem. Right. This is unacceptable performance. It's unsafe. It's financially stupid call it what you want a lot of different so i said i'll tell you what i'll volunteer to be the

chairman of an effort a group working with westinghouse to fix this that's how i got became the chairman so so four years later and what we started to do, I think I mentioned yesterday, Weston and Giles, fortunately at the time, even though all the plants were built and running, they had site representatives. And they had a rather crude computer-based reporting system. So the guys every morning could kind of give plant status and send it into Pittsburgh. It was kind of a way for them to be back and forth. And it was computer based, so it was pretty easy.

So then the organization was formed after Three Mile Island. Again, it comes back to the human performance aspect of things. They developed this human performance evaluation system. And what it was is a bunch of forums asking certain questions to get a sense of how people do things what they're thinking at the time like behavioral questions yeah that's so gotcha so we converted that that form into a reactor trip report wow and we got it to every Westinghouse rep at every power plant. So if they have a reactor trip, you can't skip anything. You got to fill this form.

I don't care how painful you think it is. How many reactor coolant pumps were running? Did they trip it manually or did it trip by itself? What were the plant conditions at the time? Did all the equipment work properly? Blah, blah, blah. So we just started to accumulate these things. Oh, gotcha.

And say, okay, what are we seeing here? We're having all these trips. What's the culprits, right? The other thing we did is every time you had a plant event like that, a reactor trip, you had to send a licensee event report to nrc and explain why you think the reactor trip what you had to fix blah blah blah so you could go back online so we reviewed about like 500 of those things and And was that old school, like paper copy review? Yeah. Yeah.

We're talking. Yeah. So we're reviewing these things and all of us are reviewing them. Knew a bit about plan ops and maintenance and stuff. So we're sitting in a meeting one day and we said, we reviewed 500 of these and 33% of them are fairy tales. Folks made up something. I think I know the problem.

Here's what we're doing about it. We need to get this sucker. It doesn't say that in the form, but we need to get this sucker back online. 33% of those were bogus information because we were operations driven. We got to get this sucker running we didn't really care if we understood why we got in that condition in

the first place was that operations meaning financially oh generate you're losing 500 or 750 000 a day okay so so there right there is a cultural bone right yeah yeah we know it's important to generate yeah but you can't the thing that you didn't find out was the root cause of why that happened so guess what it's lurking in the weeds again to bite you in the butt again right it's great you wrote that great ler report to get back online but there's a little gremlin in that station there waiting to get you dang because here's here's my it's always been my way of explaining it. The plant does not care if you're the CEO, the person that sweeps the turbine deck,

the operator in the control room. If you don't do the right things and keep it healthy, it don't care, it will tell on you. Right. It doesn't care who you are. It doesn't care if you're the board of directors. Right. It doesn't care. It will tell on you. Right. It doesn't care who you are. It didn't care if you're the board of directors, it doesn't care. It's a dumb machine. If you leave gremlins in there, the machine's going to let you know sooner or later.

So the outcome of all that data gathering was you saw trends and then you could say, look, here's, here's some improvements you can make, whether it's systems, equipment, workflows, whatever, and then you already standardized that out to all those different things. So what we ended up doing is saying, okay, and there's two kind of different operating points you're interested in. One is startup. Startup is difficult because the plants and the instrumentation are designed to be at 100%.

So when you're at low power, the feed water flow is on the bottom of the scale. The steam generator levels are about normal. But a lot of the instrumentation is at the bottom of the scale. Okay. You're not getting, it's hard to tell really what's going on i mean you know what you're operating and where you're trying to get to but so an example of that is we we had a group go around or we had a group come to the westinghouse simulator and they seemed to be the operators that always got called in to start up the plant and so we wanted to know why

that was what was their model for getting through that process given the indication in the greatest for getting there and a lot of the trips at that level were caused by main tree work okay it was like 38 percent of the time it was main feed wall yeah so basically they shared with us kind of a in essence a trick they learned so the reactor doesn't care power wise where the steam's going okay so you have a set of valves in the plant that's called, some of them call them turbine bypass valves, the other one called steam dump valves. They basically are connected to the main steam lines, and you can direct steam right into the condenser

without going through the turbine. Right. So, and most of those valves are good for somewhere around 40% power. If I were to open all those up, I could run the reactor at 40 power and keep it keep it balanced keep it in equilibrium gotcha reactor doesn't care it's saying hey steam's going somewhere in it somewhere yeah i need this much power right gotcha so their trick was a big deal and and you're also if you take it up to that power now things are coming in range

right the indicators the flow indicators and so forth steam flow feed flow so the trick was get the steam ducts to where the reactor's up to 30 or so percent power 35 start bringing the main turbine on and as you bring the main turbine on it's coming up back off the steam dumps so you just swapped where the steam was going so instead of going straight in the condenser now it's going through the turbine but the reactor doesn't know the difference it's just it's steam flowing right it doesn't care. So much heat's coming out of the system, I don't care. So then if you do that, when you have the steam dumps, you put main feed water on automatic, level control.

Okay? Because at the bottom, a lot of it was, we can't control the steam generators. We've got a low level or a high level, and the reactor trips off. Well, now you put main feed in automatic now it's automatically controlling level instead of the operators guessing and off you go you're good to go however comma

if you're going to try that trick please please make sure that your steamed up bowels work properly. It's a great idea, but these bowels need to work properly or are you going to get yourself in trouble? So as someone that certainly doesn't know at all how the plant works and, and kind of understood what you just said, you all saw a trend, right? And said, this thing keeps happening 37% of the time that causes a strip. And then what was it that you gave? Was it a change in the procedure

that then could help reduce that? Well, yeah, it was kind of a change in how you did startup. And it was credible because this was coming from folks that did this all the time it wasn't coming from a bunch of engineers and i retire one theory one coming no yeah one coming from management so this is coming from guys that do this all the time they're called in in the middle of the night to get the dang plant on online because they know how to do it better than anybody else. Right. So we produce a report and operators go, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Nice. We ought to incorporate that in our, you know.

I mean, and it was from people like them, right? The data was from their peers. It wasn't from a theorized study in books, right? That's huge. Real world. Right. I mean, and it's, you you know it's similar to like you know not to dog on but the project management you know institute in the body of knowledge basically the

giant book that is the basis for like your pmp certification right right it's got some practical stuff in there right and it's got a lot of stuff that nobody uses, right? That I've rarely seen. The benefit of it is, say, you're going to start a project management office or you're new in project management, the theories and some of the tools. It's good to say, hey, we're going to base our structure off these kind of things. And then you get to the real world and realize here's about the 30% of that you actually need. Yeah. From people in the field, right? The real bottom line to that is that you don't know as much as you think you know.

Yeah. Don't be afraid to ask other people. Yeah. Great point. Don't be afraid to ask. Don't let your ego get in the way of real knowledge. Great point. So that's why we implemented the whole thing.

Most of the reports we put out were not coming from an ivory tower. For example, another one is less percentage, but the electrohydraulic control system is just a big cabinet with electronics and it controls 3,000- pound hydraulic fluid that operates the big valves that control the turbine either shut it off completely or control the speed up. So they were sending, they were having issues maybe in the cabinet and they would send the technician in there with inadequate training and an out-of-date tech man. Oh, no.

Well, you may as well play Russian roulette and put six bullets in the gun. Right. It's one of those gremlins that's going to get you. The plant doesn't care. Right. If you go do stupid things, it could be the CEO going in there and it's going to bite you anyway. It doesn't care. Sounds like another leadership kind of correction, too. Oh, yeah, yeah. going to bite you anyway it doesn't care sounds like another another leadership kind of correction oh yeah yeah but but see that's been the hardest thing and in my experience in all these years kev

is the people side of things and getting people out of the group think mode right just look we know you're important well you know you're a smart person but guess what there's other smart people out there too yeah and they got stuff you might need to do good point so do not run a meeting and discourage them from talking right that's the key yeah put your damn ego well i had this problem up at the at the wtp project because it's been going on so long they get in a rut right so the loud usually what happens initially until i started fussing at him was the loudest guy in the room always won yeah because he intimidated his his peers and the doe people so he or she always won because they were loudest and they talked most right so they didn't get the information they need

that's fine you can run a meeting that way but doesn't work out well usually no and eventually those folks hopefully get rooted out anywhere and it's like yeah yeah so in four years to sum it up in four years we turned the entire industry around because eventually we were doing so well and figuring this stuff out we were initially just the westinghouse units the the babcock and wilcox, Combustion Engineering, and GE joined us. Wow. So now we had the whole fleet in the United States. At the time, I think the Westinghouse units were maybe half or a little over half the units. Okay.

But eventually, we got them all, drew them all in, shared the information like we should have been doing anyway. Right. And all the lessons learned went to all the, shared the information like we should have been doing anyway. Right. And all the lessons learned went to all the plants in the country. That's huge. So that made a big, that made a big difference. So what did we change in all this?

Attitudes. We didn't, there wasn't 10,000 design changes involved. We didn't change out. Everybody had Asco-Solid valves, Woolamette pumps, limit torque operators, blah, blah, blah.

It's all the same dang hardware. What's the difference? What's the performance difference? It's the people. It's the people. Everybody says, oh, we designed this safety system to shut down the reactor and trip the turbine, blah, blah, blah, open the trip breakers and so on.

So in the case of the Surrey North End events, that system was done in less than a minute. Yeah, trip the reactor, shut down the turbine, did what it was supposed to do, and guess what? It couldn't deal with the fire suppression system. They weren't know what it was supposed to do, and guess what? They couldn't deal with the fire suppression system that weren't supposed to go off. Couldn't deal with the pipe rupture in the

people that were hurt in the turbine building. Right. So what's the difference? A synchronized, dedicated group of people that feel like they own the place.

This is my power plant. Don't you mess with it. Right. Tell me what you think the problem is because I might have a different opinion because I run the dang thing. Yeah. But don't be afraid to share that.

It's a great point, it makes a difference so the organization needs to put a pin in his ego when you have a meeting do it for the purpose of learning things not showing how small yeah big difference right it is big difference to the environment in the room who participates whether they're scared to participate or not that used to always worry me i would do my darndest when we had a meeting to draw in people that i knew were naturally shy right they were good if we were just clowning around in my group and doing stuff but you got them in a room with a bunch of execs and me and and they just clammed up and right and you've run into that they just so you got it's up to the leader to create an environment

that that alleviates that now they're always still going to be shy sure they got stuff up here you need to know right they just do right they're doing different stuff than you if you you're trying to figure out well how do we make the office more efficient i'm sure they got they may not know how the reactor works but they could sure help you make the office more efficient because here's what i do every day and i think this stuff we're doing here's done yeah we shouldn't be we shouldn't be doing that oh i didn't know that yeah i'm glad you told it right i'm afraid still to this day the intimidation factor in leadership is still too prevalent i don't know how if you run across it still, but the loudest person in the room isn't always right.

The one that always talks the most isn't always right. And they need to learn that. If they don't learn that, they're not going to have an effective organization. It's just not going to happen. Human nature. I've definitely seen it. I'm lucky nowadays, honestly, that the leaders kind of talk the least, which is great. And they're open to a lot of stuff. nowadays, honestly, the leaders kind of talk the least, which is great. Yeah.

And are open to a lot of stuff. We talked about it in something, you know, similarly, I try and model, honestly, is other than getting the meeting started and facilitating it. Right. Really, the team builds the plan and I make sure to support them to make it happen. Yeah. That's really my job not to do that for them. It's a team to get something done, right?

Yep. And you got to use it, especially the complex stuff you do. Yeah. Everybody's got to make it work because doing that network stuff and all the stuff you guys do is not easy. Yeah. You know, I'm talking about before of, you know, the difference of instead of it's my plant, like, hey, these are my patients. This is my hospital. That's it.

Right. of it instead of it's my plant like hey these are my patients this is my hospital this is right which is which is not the the guy in the network closet or gal yeah you know has a different perspective than the person that's putting the the bandages on that's doing this and and all of it goes together to to mesh similar to your point sweeping the floor doing the controls writing the executive policies whatever it all has to go together and has to be treated you know different but but but equally right they they affect things oh yeah different ways but well this may sound sappy but another way i would express it is hey we're taking care of children yeah 100 we got to get this done that was yeah pretty proud we got to make it work right yeah absolutely the um yeah so that's a huge difference so many i think lessons that people are going to apply whether they're in nuclear power or not to

what you just talked about changing culture and people and just to touch on just because we're a bit over an hour i think i'm going to do a part one and part two honestly which is great um but to that um so in the 2000s it seems like largely between you know the 2000s and now you know 2020s it's a lot moving toward digital planning for digital control those kind of things and yeah and updated and improvised tech specs um and well we call them they're improved from the old old stuff they're not improved yeah they're improved so that so for you know to do that is it really you know especially you know a bit in the 90s but really in 2000s you know that digital world you know everything going digital digital displays which is amazing for me you know

and i'm sure you just and you were a pioneer in early computing with Macs and things like that. But it's just amazing the transformation that technology's had in not that long of a period of time to what they have now. So is there, are the obstacles, and actually I think you touched on it too, of, you know, what are a couple big advantages of digital? And what are some cautions, like you mentioned, keeping your analog while you add the digital, but what are some cautions like you mentioned keeping your analog while you add the digital but what are some cautions you would have with well i mean if it works properly as you know about digital stuff you can uh go into like say there's a safety system logic and you can go in there and look to see if that logic is functioning properly. For example, the system I was helping license that is made in Germany, TXS, you can actually get on a machine

and look into the bowels of that thing. For some reason, we're getting an alarm from the safety injection system. You can go in there and look to see where the logic's falling. Well, you can't do that with an analog oh analog system okay more precise troubleshooting and i'm here to tell you the nrc is very nervous about total they still are computer control is that like from kind of infrastructure protection standpoint and hacking and, you know, I mean, there's some legitimacy there, it seems. A bit, but again, it's the whole focus of your actor safety, right?

Right. What if this thing doesn't do the functions that you say are supposed to work in the safety analysis? Right. Because you can't test it the same way. Right. Yeah. You can take a meter down there

see if the transmitter is sending you what you need then you go to the end of that wire and see that you got 10 volts yeah if some code in there is doing something squirrelly you might find out the hard way hard to find yeah right so a big deal in digital is the quality assurance aspect of managing that software just like the robot we talked about right how did you assure that the code you wrote will do under varying conditions now for example if you're running the plant i think i mentioned it yesterday and you lose off-site power what does the plant do how does it behave and then it comes back sometimes that causes more problems than when it goes away yeah because things start back up they re-energize so what happens to the computer system is it have you got all of it on the ups uninterrupt an interruptible power system, and so it just stays on?

Or are there parts you forgot, and this little switch over here shuts down, and all of a sudden you lose communication somewhere? So you've got to go through that thing with a fine-toothed comb. How do you manage the quality assurance of the software? And architecturally, how have you set this thing up? Are there any single point failures in this thing that could bring the whole world crashing down around your ears? And you got a nuclear reactor to take that's why I'm kind of inclined to say, okay,

the systems I put in are just for display, which works for it. Now you're going to be able to go on a screen and say, I want to start the main feedwater pump, you hit touchscreen, boom, pump starts, right. And that's, I think it's great. I've been trying to push utilities in that direction. Yeah. But I'm kind of like the NRC, I guess now to To go full bore and not have a backup, it's there anyway, because I can implement the digital.

I don't have to, I hardly have to do anything except set up workstation. Right. Just like now, we've got digital displays in several locations in the control room. It's just you can't control stuff with it, but you can monitor every system in the plant.

Well, now I touch a button on a screen and get some action in the plant. Right. What if it doesn't happen? Then you got to have a fail over to the analog system or. Well, something, or you just leave, leave the normal controls there. There's no, everybody's trained on knows how to operate and somehow be able to do the control of that pump in parallel right but not have it interfere with one another in other words if i'm doing digital control i could still go over

there to the analog switch and change state no matter what the digital control said right unless you need to lock something out because you don't want that to happen but you see what i'm saying yeah yeah the guys already know the board it's already there it's been in there for years you know it works okay so right i would start out by putting digital control stations that's easy it doesn't take a lot of space a lot of cabinets right and try and operate that way and see what kind of things you run into and i know it's tested in a simulator and all that kind of stuff and the software is tested but like i I say, in certain conditions, like if power is flopping around, how does that system behave?

Right. What's the architecture look like? What's the power supplies look like? Does something lose power that is critical to getting information somewhere else? The only one way to find out. It's a good case for a phased approach then, right? Like, Oh yeah. Hey, let's add this component, run it a little bit. Let's add this.

Well, because it's so easy to do in my mind, it's so easy to do. I can set up digital control stations with all this stuff still in place. I need to do squat. I might replace all the old, I'll refer to them, I guess, as analog enunciator windows, which are on a vertical section way up high above the board. Okay. I might rip those out and put computer screens on. Nice ones, yeah. That's fine.

So for... It's an interesting transition. It kind of concerns me. I think this stuff will work fine, but you won't know until you. Yeah, we'll see. Until you're actually operating the plants different than a simulator. You know, and to that. So you and I have talked about that a lot, you know, over the years of the state of, you know, so American nuclear power use drastically declined or didn't grow like it should have or was going to after Three Mile Island, right?

Yeah. Which had hype, fear, media. There was the movie The China Standard. All this nuclear is going to kill you all the time. Yeah. And over the decades, we haven't grown like France, right, which is a huge consumer of nuclear energy. And they're not as dependent on fossil fuels. 80%. It's ramping up tons of

plants up right so what would you say are kind of the top two hindrances to our growth as a nuclear politician powered yeah politician gotcha and is that based off do you think just not accurate information and trying to meet? They don't know any better. They don't understand. They know people are afraid, so they're afraid to make a decision to say, I think nuclear power is good. Some of them do. Don't get me wrong. You'll see someone on TV says, oh, I'm in favor of nuclear power.

But there's a bunch of old school ones. Not so much. Do you think, I don't know how to your point, how it would happen and be funded and all that, but kind of a national campaign or even start locally, right, around plants? And I saw this in emergency management. We work with Dominion and other companies to do those drills. And how would we decon people and all that kind of stuff? But if there was more kind of outreach and education and then you know more

advertising basically for nuclear power which you don't see as much right you know it's like gas you see a lot of right they have a pretty strong marketing campaign going on but it seems like from a from a you know let's get the word out um or do you think companies look at that as wasted money because it's not going to be approved per policy and politicians? Right. Well, yeah. Well, that's the deal. See, I could you can promote it all you want, but unless it's sincere.

Yeah. From the heart says, you know, we really need this technology. It's it's a national security issue. It's if you're really concerned about the environment, support of the environment. And not only that, something we didn't get into much, we're talking about the spent fuel a little bit.

There's still 95% of the energy left in that fuel. So we shouldn't be burying it in the mountain. Yeah. We should, France reprocesses fuel, recovers the uranium. You need a special facility for it obviously because it's really radioactive stuff and they reuse it jimmy carter killed that

because he was uh concerned about uh nuclear proliferation right well to give you a feel has happened fuel assembly is 12 13 feet tall it's about eight by eight inches and once it's been in that reactor the radioactivity will probably kill you in about two minutes wow so you're not going to go grab one of those go steal it in your pickup truck right because you'll be dead before you ever get to your destination and not only that physically people don't understand this these things weigh about 12 1300 pounds that's the other piece no human's going to lift it by itself and they need to be handled vertically structurally they're not made unless you got to support the complete length of the fuel assembly they're not made to be handled horizontally they will fall apart because the way it works is you

got a top nozzle the bottom nozzle and there's 21 tubes that connect those two nozzles right but the fuel pins are hanging from those tubes by friction. They're called grid straps. So the way that works is before you put the top nozzle on, you insert the fuel pins and those grid straps. The grid straps have four little dimples on the inside, and there's seven of them along the length of the fuel assembly and so that pin is held in there by friction and neither end of that fuel pin touches the top or bottom nozzle now why do you think that is well when metal heats up it expands

and when it goes down it contracts so if you if you fasten the ends to those top nozzles and bottom nozzle, when it heated up and make a big banana, make it a big battery. Well, it physically would turn into a big banana. It can't expand, right? So it would just bend. Wow. Pretty ingenious design. If you think about it.

So those pins can expand and contract and not uh get out of shape not make a bow or an arch right because they're anchored at both ends so the thought that i'm going to sneak up into a into a fuel place make a little suitcase bomb is nonsense no not gonna happen not unless you're willing to die you have a ball but you know there are some but to your point physically like that's it's not going to happen you're not going to happen. Not unless you're willing to die. Have a ball. Go for it. Which, you know, there are some, but to your point, physically, like that's not going to happen. You're not going to sit there and chip away a piece of that. No. Nobody's just going to go grab some fuel assemblies and make a ball.

It ain't going to happen. What would be your strategy to get U.S. nuclear power back on track? Let's say you have that politician whoever's in charge you're like okay let's do it well i want to do it more for lack of a better word i guess efficiently for example there's two reactors coming online in georgia you may have heard of the vogel power station but it's clear to me they didn't apply the lessons learned in terms of building. The most costly part of doing this process is construction. Okay.

So when you're building one of those facilities, you're burning about $2 million a day. Wow. $2 million a day or more. Right. I might be a little low on that number so if you don't have the design done uh that drags it out right because the nrc's got to review whatever part of the design is not done and prove it having all that stuff and you're digging dirt and building buildings and pouring concrete and da da da so the Vogel plant has cost

now I think it'll end up costing twice what they projected when you're talking billions of dollars billions and it took probably at least twice as long as they projected it would take to get it in service

that's what we used to do in the 70s and 80s. So what did we learn? Gotcha. So you got to wonder, well, what in the world were they doing? They know how we used to do it. And I will submit to you that all the design wasn't done. They were in the middle of doing stuff and all of a sudden

these field changes show up oh we got to move this pipe we got to add this control we got to you're toast you're just toast the nrc's got to approve it then they got to make sure you put it in right and you're doing stuff on the fly and that's the worst thing in the world when you're burning that kind of money for that yeah we ought to but japan used to on a routine basis build a plant and have it in service in five years wow like clockwork you can almost set your watch to why because six segment efficiencies all well if they if they had a certain plant design and they wanted more of those they just made six more they didn't screw around with the design because i want it better different that way does it still work generate steam and make power yeah okay go to another one just like this first of all we know how to do this one now we've done one so the next one ought to be a little

better right then the next one we don't do that here we just we refuse so their standardization made it easier and and i mean that that is the you know was it it, was it Toyota or Motorola that did the six Sigma, right. And that performance improvement, how do we become more efficient? Right. And you know, I'd imagine when you have the same template, but you're like, Hey, tweak this just a little, and then, okay, keep going. But using the same plan and folks at the same teams or, you know what I mean? That knowledge is transferred and there's efficiency. So would you then look at, you know what i mean that knowledge is transferred and there's efficiency so would you then look at you know short of having folks mail you papers maybe a digital survey this time but

look at like okay what are we doing across the country how are we getting them ready how do we build it are we using similar templates or or the same so that we can put them in and kind of standardize the process across the industry that's it yeah that's why it needs to be done or it's just not cost effective yeah look at the money it costs the only reason i think georgia pratt didn't go bankrupt is because they have deep pockets they got a bunch of other units running they could i mean the cost of those plants is doubled wow and we're talking going from i don't know nine or ten billion to 13 14 15 billion i don't know what the number is now and there's no mandate like um you know from the doe or nrc to say like hey everyone has to build it this way because it's

privately funded right like yes yeah well the the theory on the new plants was they're all standard design to me that means the the design is totally done totally right every control circuit every building layout every system it's go run this pipe it goes a certain place certain run everything is done done so i just take the drawings and say okay we need to build this building this way with this stuff in it and here's how it goes together we need to build this building this way well probably the the thing that drew it out was they got a license for a standard plant, but the control digital control system really wasn't done yet. So they sold the concept.

Here's how our digital control system is planned to work, but they didn't have all the details done exactly how the architecture i talked about and yeah how am i going to lay this out how am i going to make sure done that single point failures blah blah blah wasn't really done pays it what you're building how well you gotta know or the money it's just it goes up so you just, you lose control of the project. That's what happened. Well, they were doing the same thing in South Carolina, VC Summer. A couple of companies went bankrupt. The rate payers in South Carolina are on the hook for $9 billion, and they got no PowerPoint.

Dang. That's how bad, that's how sideways it can go which i would imagine in addition to hype and fear and all that stuff financial people that have felt the financial impact or or yeah cautioned to be like yeah let's try this again after they lost all that well the the rate the ratepayers, they were told, said, if you just pay, we want to put some new nuclear power plants in the state. If you just pay this much extra on your bill, it will cover it.

Well, the project was mismanaged. They paid that extra on their bill. And now the state's in the hole, $9 billion with no power plant. Jeez. extra on their bill and now the state's in the whole nine billion dollars wouldn't go powerful jeez it's it's that's the reality of right so at least the vogel project they they had enough backers and deep pockets i guess that they were determined they were going to get done almost and there was a lot of fuss in that for them for the

cost and schedule but they were determined they were going to put those suckers online and now they're going online but at double the cost and probably took twice as long to build them as it should have that was the Achilles heel of the entire nuclear industry early on. Costs way too much. We're not putting them on the line when we should. Not good. To give you some idea, we call Surrey the goose that lays the golden eggs. Both those units, I think, at the time in the 70s,

cost $500 million. Two units. Wow. North Anna, even with the delay in unit two because of TMI, I think it was maybe $1.6 billion. Now you're looking at for two units like in Vogel, I don't know, $17 billion, $16 billion. Wow.

And you say the gold net because when they're working,'re working they're putting that power they're making money right yeah and that goes back to the community everything too right like it's you know they invest and it makes this whole cycle that doesn't just help the company that owns the right the power plant right it helps everybody around them well there's taxes they get from from that right and then there's there's every 18 months, you got to refuel the reactor and do a bunch of maintenance. A bunch of people come in that do that kind of work, spend all kind of money

in that little town. Then they go on to the next one, but that little town does pretty good because that happens every 18 months. That's a good point. It's kind of a ecosystem of sorts right yeah so well hey dad uh wow i i knew a lot of this stuff not a lot of the details but um i appreciate it i hope the folks listening and watching uh appreciate this too this more of a primer really a bit of

a primer and in-depth on nuclear power and just some of the non-nuclear specific takeaways i know i took in addition to what we talked about of you know having the right people for the job makes a big difference and and even though you have some of those book folks versus the reality operators you find a place for both of them yep you know all of them you know it's not just what you're doing but that why that's huge for everybody on your team, right. Feel like they own it and make it a big deal. And you mentioned, when we talked before, you know, asking what, why and why, and why being, is it okay that we do this? Not just like, why are we,

why are we doing this? Yeah. And it sounds like that, unfortunately, I guess it's still a challenge is that culture and synergy, but a big impact that you were able to make in the nuclear industry is, is to help make things safer and meet what sounds like that overall, you know, objective to, to put out good power and then keep people safe. A huge factor.

So I've appreciated talking to you for the past couple of days, it's been like five hours and of course, longer than that throughout our life. I hope everybody else has and learned a whole lot between your, your service, you know, to your family, to me,

to the Navy, to the nuclear industry. I appreciate it. I love you. I appreciate spending the time with you. Yeah. Love you too, Seth.

Thanks again, everybody for staying to the end. I hope you enjoyed this window into the nuclear power industry in the United States and learn how plants work, a bit about what it's going to take for us to catch up and move forward of other countries, let alone just to be maybe less dependent on other countries for oil and fossil fuels and things because we can use nuclear power and it's pretty safe, actually. It just hasn't gotten good coverage or good press over the years for a long time, but I think we need to repursue it. I was glad I pursued this discussion with my father.

It was very good to talk to him. I hope you all enjoyed it as well. Please visit capstockspot.com for more information and to listen to the first part of this, where we hear about my dad growing up in the steel town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, and then moving into the United States Navy in the subsurface where he got into the nuclear power industry. And just visit the site, leave a review. That'd be very helpful on apple and spotify i appreciate your time i hope this is helpful got more great guests coming up and i look forward to sharing their stories and some solo episodes about best practice processes with you all and remember to have that plan to keep your teams aligned stay informed with facts

not fear or rumors and get involved so you can make a difference godspeed y'all