No. S-08-028

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Good afternoon. I want to thank the American Nuclear Society for inviting me to participate on this distinguished panel to discuss issues associated with the infrastructure needed to maintain safe and secure nuclear energy. I look forward to hearing the perspectives from my fellow panelists from the manufacturing, architect-engineer, and academic sectors. I’m very pleased that we will also get an international perspective from our panel today, as nuclear energy infrastructure issues are clearly influenced by the global economy. Today I’d like to provide a personal perspective on what I believe to be the most important of the infrastructure challenges facing the NRC and the industry. I emphasize that I am providing only my personal views today, and not necessarily those of the Commission.

I became a Commissioner in January 2005 at a time when serious interest in building new nuclear plants in the U.S. was just beginning. As you are certainly aware, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 passed by Congress that summer caused a significant acceleration of this interest. Since that time, the adequacy of the regulatory and industrial infrastructures, under the foreseeable scenarios of new plant construction, has been one of my foremost concerns.

You might ask why the regulator would be concerned about the industry’s infrastructure. I would respond by noting that assurance of quality is always a regulatory concern. That includes the quality of plant designs and their technical bases. It includes the quality of the construction methods used on-site. It includes the quality of the components being manufactured at locations throughout the world. I could speak today of the challenges associated with maintaining the quality in each of these areas. However, instead I want to discuss the one single component of infrastructure that is fundamental to each of these quality areas: that is, the people who will – or possibly won’t - achieve the necessary quality. As a regulator, in setting requirements and ensuring that those requirements are met, we must recognize and account for the industrial infrastructure that will ultimately determine whether the required standards are met. Quality people, both at the NRC, within the industry, and at our related educational and research institutions, are the key infrastructure component to that achievement.

This is my main point today: People, or “human capital” if you prefer, must always remain a significant focus for both the regulator and the industry. It is the same population of educated, trainable, trained, and experienced people from which we both need to recruit in order to accomplish our goals. Creating, sustaining, and growing such a population is a shared challenge among government, industry, and academia.

Alan Greenspan once noted, somewhat wryly, that:

“If you can solve the education problem, you don’t have to do anything else. If you don’t solve it, nothing else is going to matter all that much.” 

Although Mr. Greenspan was making a rather global societal statement, and an exceptionally astute one at that, I would argue that it is equally relevant to smaller populations such as ours.

So what can the NRC do about it?  First, this year Congress appropriated $15 million to NRC for use in fostering educational programs that broadly support the nuclear power industry. These funds are to be used for college scholarships and graduate fellowships in nuclear science, engineering, and health physics; faculty development grants supporting faculty in these academic areas; and scholarships for trade schools in the nuclear-related trades. That $15 million came somewhat as a surprise, and we have had to react quickly to develop the organizational and administrative mechanisms to dispense these funds. We don’t know whether Congress will continue to provide us with such funds, but as long as Congress continues to invest its dollars and its trust in us, we will do our very best to make a difference as Congress intends. In addition, the NRC utilized provisions of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to award 27 grants in 17 states for our Nuclear Education Grant Program and to award 10 grants for our Scholarship and Fellowship Grant Program to universities.

Second, I continue to strongly advocate that every one of us, no matter what our position or background, should be involved in encouraging young people at all educational levels to learn about the science and technologies that so impact our global society. This isn’t just an altruistic endeavor, although it certainly could be. I am a strong supporter of the NRC’s involvement, both officially and through volunteerism of our employees, in our local student science fairs. The NRC regularly gives recognition to deserving middle and high school students for science projects that have relevance to our regulatory mission. A word of encouragement from a respected adult can make an immense difference in the life of a young person. I hope each of you find opportunities to make such a difference.

Third, I make it a point to personally visit universities, community colleges, and training facilities and stress the importance of building the educational elements of our national infrastructure that will produce our most valuable resource: people. You are sitting here today, at this conference, because of the investments that society as a whole made toward your education and most importantly because of the personal investments of your many teachers, professors, and mentors. Lee Iaccoca, who was CEO of Chrysler Corporation, once said that:

“In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less…”

I hope that you are finding a role, no matter what your job, of being a teacher or mentor to someone else. As I have already noted, an adequate regulatory and industrial infrastructure depends on having a large enough pool of talent from which to recruit and, once recruited, having strong continuing education and mentoring. This is both a shared challenge and a global one.

The good news is that I see more and more industry partnerships with community colleges and universities. I also see continued investment by DOE in university research, which helps sustain our nuclear engineering, sciences, and technology programs, although I wish DOE were doing more in this area, and I continue to encourage that. Also, in the good news department is that we have seen increasing student enrollment and graduation rates in nuclear engineering and radiation health programs. But even with these increases, there will still be a personnel shortfall, based on the projected demand and expected retirement rates.

The potential labor shortage could impact the entire nuclear infrastructure, including national laboratories, Federal and state agencies, nuclear technology vendors and manufacturing companies, nuclear construction companies, and university engineering departments. This is the infrastructure from which the NRC draws its diverse knowledge base as well as its human capital. In addition, our regulatory infrastructure includes our many international regulatory colleagues. This is why I am so pleased to see international representation on this panel today. In particular, I want to acknowledge the importance of international research and collaboration that I believe is so important in a global nuclear economy.

Focusing for a moment on the NRC, I believe it is important that NRC’s access to human capital and its growing knowledge base remain diverse. This is because the NRC must remain flexible and responsive to emerging and diverse challenges. For example, where the frontiers of knowledge are expanding rapidly, such as advanced computer simulation codes and digital instrumentation and controls, the NRC needs to make a concerted effort to catch up. In other cases, the NRC must lead the drive to push the boundaries of our capability, such as improving the state-of-the-art, realism, and usefulness of reactor risk and consequence analysis tools to better inform our regulatory decisions. In still other cases, the NRC must remain well informed of current and advancing research in areas such as radiation health effects studies and research by industry and DOE in support of developing and licensing non-light-water advanced reactors like the Next Generation Nuclear Plant, which have the potential for inherent and passive safety.

The NRC must remain a technically strong and independent regulator. We have established and will maintain an infrastructure to attract good employees and retain them. In the past five years, the NRC has seen a significant increase in employees between the ages of 22 and 35. Five years from now those numbers are expected to increase further while also migrating upward as expected. We have grown from about 2800 to 3600 employees in the last seven years  and are challenged to provide excellent working environments for everyone. I could have chosen to speak today on these internal NRC infrastructure challenges. Or I could have spoken on the many challenges industry faces, such as ensuring acceptable quality in the global supply chain of parts, components, and construction techniques for a new generation of nuclear power plants.

Instead, I offer a more fundamental message: Our people are our most important resource. Whatever challenges we may face, our people will be the ones to overcome them. We must be their mentors, we must instill in them the right safety consciousness early in their careers, and then we must empower them.

As Nobel Laureate, educator, and physicist Dr. Richard Feynman once said: 

“Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions,
and pass them on.”

In closing, I believe that if people are given a chance and the tools to make a difference, they will often exceed our expectations. Every one of us has a responsibility to properly develop the human infrastructure to maximize our human potential. This is the most important and fundamental infrastructure challenge of all.

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Wednesday, June 18, 2008