NUCLEAR ENERGY INSTITUTE US Chief Nuclear Officer Trip to Japan Media Briefing Transcript Moderator: John Keeley Oct. 1, 2013 Noon ET Operator: Good day and welcome to the U.S. Chief Nuclear Officer Trip to Japan conference call. Today s conference is being recorded. At this time I would like to turn the conference over to John Keeley. Please go ahead, sir. John Keeley: Thank you, Mike. John Keeley with NEI s media team here in Washington and I had the privilege of joining a small group of communicators to accompany our CNOs over to Japan last month and I ll offer just a couple of very general observations about that experience and then turn over the program to our senior vice president and Chief Nuclear Officer Tony Pietrangelo. And before I get started just quick logistics just as with all of our media events here, we will have a replay an audio replay and a transcript of the call available. We expect to have one or both products up on the website by day s end or mid-tomorrow morning at the latest. If you have any questions about that availability or any other questions related to the program, by all means contact me. My email address JMK as in John Michael Keeley, jmk@nei.org. Direct line here in D.C. 202.739.8020. We did have all of the chief nuclear officers from the U.S. fleet operating facilities over in Japan for a week in the middle of last month to gain a first-hand assessment of the impact of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that hit the Daiichi and Daini sites and impacted those sites in dramatically different ways. Over the course of that week, the trip I would really urge some acknowledgement for INPO (Institute for Nuclear Power Operations) in organizing this trip. This was an INPO-conceived trip. The logistics for it were absolutely remarkable in coordinating everybody s schedules and as the week went on I think all of gained an appreciation for the remarkable substance of that program. Our CNOs in addition to touring three significant sites had in-person encounters and engagement with site leadership, with reactor operators and key TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Co.) figures who were actually on the site when 3/11 struck and I know Tony will speak to this in greater detail but as you might imagine, that was a remarkably powerful set of experiences over the course of a week. We got some remarkable presentations from those individuals and I think Tony will attest here in a moment that what the CNOs went over to obtain in terms of lessons learned and perspectives that you can t necessarily get about third-hand actually did occur. One reflection that really stood with me as I interacted with the CNOs throughout the course of the week came from FirstEnergy s Pete Sena and we actually shot video of Pete near the end of the trip and trying to capture this reflection but he really was impressed and moved by the account from the Daini stories and the Daini workers and their dedication and the site leadership. 1
And I remember him telling some reporters over there in Tokyo that the Daini workers in particular were authentic national heroes for the actions that they took on 3/11 and the days and weeks following and in his account and in his assessment, he did not believe that their story had actually been told. And that really resonated with me. But you re not here to hear me, I ll turn it over now to our Senior VP and Chief Nuclear Officer Tony Pietrangelo for greater depth of remarks. Tony? Tony Pietrangelo: Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everybody. Just a little bit more on the sign-up of the trip. A couple of us had been over to Japan since 3/11. Joe Pollock and I were there in February at different trips. I saw Daiichi firsthand. Joe saw Daini firsthand. A couple of other CNOs had been to Japan and had toured Daiichi and each came back saying everybody really needs to see this to get the firsthand account of the consequences of a severe accident because it really underscores why safety is our first priority each and every day. One of those CNOs was Randy Edington from Arizona Public Service. He chairs INPO s executive advisory group that all the chief nuclear officers serve on and the recommendation through our Fukushima steering committee was that all the chief nuclear officers need to go see Japan firsthand, what transpired at Daiichi. There was quick agreement on the part of all the rest of the CNOs so INPO, since about March of this year, has been working with the Japan Nuclear Safety Institute (JNSI), the Japanese version of INPO, to setup the logistics for the trip so it all came about when we went from September 8th through the 14th. Those of us on the steering committee got to tour the third TEPCO site which is Kashawazaki Kariwa and then the group split up all the CNOs into two groups. Half the group saw Daiichi the second day and Daini the third day and the other half saw Daini the first day and then Daiichi because we were a big group altogether, almost 40 people with INPO, NEI and all the CNO folks attending. Let me start with Daiichi first. I had been there in February so I had seen already firsthand the devastation in that area. One of the Japanese managers on-site described it as it looks like a war zone and then the emergency response center is kind of like a military hospital. When you go out in to the field, you re full dressed in your anti-cs. Work is very difficult there under those conditions. You know, you can see still trucks that had been overturned near their intake structure, other barriers they had put in place for to preclude another tsunami from inundating the site and I had seen progress on the building that they ve put up over the Unit 4 spent fuel pool and begin removing some of the used fuel from that pool. Our understanding is that s going to commence in November of this year. While we weren t there to evaluate any part of their existing operation whether it was core cooling or spent fuel pool cooling or water management or any of the other issues you ve heard from the site, we did get a tour of the facility. We think they ve got their hands around what they need to do with respect to the continued cooling of the core and care of the spent fuel pools. Obviously water management has been a big issue there with groundwater intrusion into the site and contamination of that groundwater and needing to store I think at a rate of something like 400 tons a day of contaminated water so a big part of that site is a tank farm now. They ve got over 1,000 tanks holding contaminated water, plans to put up another 1,000 tanks. In the meantime they re testing a reprocessing system to remove the radionuclides from the 2
contaminated water and ultimately I think as everyone has come to the conclusion we have to treat that water and eventually discharge it back into the ocean. But given the issues they have with public confidence and not only TEPCO but the industry, the regulator and the government there, they really need help in establishing a transparent process to get public confidence in that cleanup activity so again I think our takeaway from Daiichi is this is why safety is Priority 1 to us. The consequences are so severe when you have an accident of that magnitude on the site. We did tour one of the towns that had been abandoned. They were letting citizens back in now during the day but they couldn t stay overnight. It ll take them years to cleanup those sites and/or those towns and allow full habitability again. But again, you know, to put the consequences in real terms, not just some probabilistic number that s out there, you know, at 10 to the minus 6 or 10 to the minus 7, see it firsthand. Again, our job now is to convey that back to our organizations as the senior leadership in the industry but why we do what we do, why we take the precautions we take, why we make safety Priority 1. We did hear from some of the people who were on-shift during the accident on 3/11 and the efforts that they undertook to try to gain control of the situation. They also were heroes and for a few operational decisions and design differences may have been able to not only preclude core damage from all three units but maybe minimized the damage and keep it contained. Those are specific issues that we can get into in Q&A if you d like. Our other visit was to Daini and as John mentioned, they largely had the same tsunami and earthquake that Daiichi had. They had four units operating on that afternoon at 100 percent power. All those four units after the earthquake were in the process of safely shutting-down and then the tsunami basically inundated their cooling water pumps and their intake structure. So they did retain one source of off-site power to their I believe it was their radwaste building and in the course of 30 hours under very, very difficult circumstances with aftershocks, cold, dark, rainy, worried about additional potential tsunamis coming in after the aftershocks. They managed to string nine kilometers of cable, replace several pumps and motors and restore cooling to those four units and basically got the safe shutdown in a matter of days. Daiichi was doing essentially the same thing except again on Unit 1 just when they were about to re-energize some of their electrical capabilities after they had strung cables all night, had the first hydrogen explosion which set their effort back substantially and basically they never recovered from that. We think, you know, when you see the leadership that was established at Daini under crisis management conditions, you had a leader who knew what he had to do, established clear direction to the people on-site, kept the status of the plant first in mind, got it done. And our take away from that was now here s a group that with really no forethought or preplanning were able to on the fly reestablish core cooling and spent fuel pool cooling and safely exit the event. That s what we re trying to do with FLEX with portable equipment and they did it, again on the fly and within 30 hours had four units basically safely cooling down. Just think what we can do with lots of foreplanning, lots of forethought, lots of training and really to us validated the approach we re taking with our regulator on FLEX as the response to Fukushima. 3
We also got a tour of some of the other measures they put in place like FLEX. They have lots of fire pumps on fire engines, mobile electric units, gas-turbine generator so they re putting a FLEXlike approach in place in case they do get another external hazard that inundates the site. We also saw at the third site not all the CNOs went to the Kashawazaki Kariwa site just our Fukushima steering committee which is about 10 CNOs and we saw many of the FLEX-like measures that they re taking similar to what they were doing at Daini, the different being that and we took a picture in front of what was the new great wall I think. This wall is 15 meters high, over a mile long, a meter thick at the top, thicker at the bottom, two or three meters. This is their new tsunami wall and just an incredible sight. They actually put this up, installed this within a year and a half took them to put this wall up. This is in accordance with the new regulations that the Japanese regulator has issued. We saw additional measures being taken, reservoirs of water above the site. The same fire engines and mobile electric units we saw at Daini are in spades at Kashawazaki Kariwa. So they were having not only implementing FLEX but also some permanent design modifications to deal with the external hazards they faced at that site in particular and I think the takeaway for us is if you want to operate a nuclear power plant in a ring of fire, here s what you re going to have to do, right, so that in itself was also very enlightening to us. Let me stop there. Let me just say the last two days we had some meetings with the chief nuclear officers in Japan. There s I think 10 operating companies that have nuclear power plants so we had all 10 Japanese CNOs there with our group. We had presentations on how we interact as CNOs in the U.S. through NEI and INPO. We also got presentations from TEPCO on their response to Fukushima. I think what was enlightening to them was that, you know, to see how our CNOs really engage through NEI, INPO and EPRI and not just in response to Fukushima but on all sorts of matters whether they be regulatory or operational and I went down the table, you know, with different CNOs we chair with different working groups that NEI has. How we engaged the NRC at the highest levels on issues of import to the industry and how NEI works to bring to leverage our industry resources through the CNOs and their organizations to help resolve technical and regulatory issues. They haven t had a similar entity like that and I think they re looking to form one now so we were trying to give them examples of how we operate here and I think that was enlightening to them. I think they are helping TEPCO with the recovery. I think obviously they know they re in the same boat now nationally with the perception of nuclear power, they are one industry there. So they re going to have to help each other get through this. Many have submitted their applications for I ll call it recertification to the regulator to try to get their units operating again in accordance with the new requirements. So that s it in a nutshell. I ll have Joe accompany Steve works full-time on Fukushima here. We re here to answer any questions you have about the specifics of the trip or what we found. John Keeley: Mike, I ll start in the room. We ve got a couple of journalists in the room. If there are any questions here, I ll start with them and then when they finish I ll ask you to solicit any questions that would be on the phone lines. Operator: Very good, thank you. 4
John Keeley: Go ahead, Bill. Bill Freebairn: Yes, following-up on the issue of the coordination between industry participants and the regulators, did you get the sense that they did not have that pre-fukushima and do you think it would have made much of a difference in responding to the Fukushima accident? Tony Pietrangelo: They did have that and no, it wouldn t have made a difference I don t think, quite frankly. I think they were really listening very intently when we discussed how we do business with each of the companies supporting each other, mutual assistance agreements and the regulator they didn t have an independent regulator pre-fukushima. We didn t get into the regulatory differences between U.S. and Japan. I think they are trying very much so to make their regulatory system more transparent and open, a la our NRC, and the whole Japan Nuclear Safety Institute is trying to be modeled after our Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. So they re trying to, you know, solicit help on how we do it here, whether you could transfer what we do in the U.S. to Japan and that culture I think remains to be seen but certainly their attempt is to improve and operate in a more cohesive manner there. John Keeley: Jeremy? Jeremy Dillon: Specifically about decommissioning, there were kind of reports that it had gone pretty poorly over there, with the cleanup and everything, what did you guys see as far as I guess the decommissioning process? Tony Pietrangelo: I think the plan is to first remove the used fuel from each of the spent fuel pools on Units 1 through 4. Unit 4 will be the first pool. They ve built a superstructure over that pool. They were just starting on that when I was there. It s largely complete now. They were installing the fuel handling machine over the Unit 4 pool and our understanding is they ll begin removing that used fuel from that pool in November of this year so they re making progress and they ll move it to Unit 3, 2 and 1, etcetera. Getting into the degraded cores in Units 1 through 3 is a different matter. You re talking decades there for that recovery and cleanup so I mean, longer term that s how long it s going to take. In the meantime, you know, this water management issue is of immediate concern and again they were testing their systems to remove the radionuclides when we were there. Our understanding is they may have one of the trains that two systems each can process 250 tons of water a day so they can start making a dent into some of that inventory that they ve builtup over the last 2-1/2 years but that s going to be a slow process as well. Jeremy Dillon: Have you did you hear anything about further creation of a national agency to kind of deal with the decommissioning process? Did that come up at all over there? Tony Pietrangelo: No. Steve Kraft: It didn t come up. Steven Kraft. It didn t come up in the meetings but there were news reports before we left that they ve created an institute that has the U.S. initials IRID. It s an offshoot of Kyoto University and as I understand the plan, they re going to locate near the Fukushima Daiichi site so it ll be kind of a combined research effort as well as a cleanup effort. That was all very preliminary just before we left but I did see that in the press. Jeremy Dillion: And they didn t bring it up during the... 5
Tony Pietrangelo: No, they didn t. John Keeley: Mike, we ll take questions from the phones if we have them. Operator: Thank you and at this time if you would like to register to ask a question, you may do so by pressing the star and 1 on your touch-tone phone. If you found that your question has already been answered, you may withdraw yourself from the queue at any time by pressing the pound key and once again it is star and 1. We ll pause just a moment to allow questions to queue. And I m showing no questions from the phones at this time. Tony Pietrangelo: Back to the room? Bill Freebairn: Yes, you mentioned the degraded cores. Obviously it s a long-term challenge but did you hear any indication of what they think the conditions might be like in the cores? I know there s not a lot of solid information but there s some speculation and there s some evidence I think. Tony Pietrangelo: Well, I think it s assumed the cores are in a breached state, not in an attack state. It doesn t take a lot of water to actually cool the cores. I think the understanding we got when we were there was about 20 gallons a minute to cool a degraded core which isn t a lot, okay, so if you could keep the groundwater from migrating into the building and mixing with that water, the water management issue would be a lot more manageable. But at that, you know, and they have some, you know, INPO s helping them lock-down the systems and looking at the reliability of their core cooling systems but they are subject to another, you know, earthquake or tsunami or storm. In fact they had severe rain the week following our trip and they didn t lose power so, you know, that s an ongoing concern that they have to keep their eye on that but they were managing that fairly well when we were there. Bill Freebairn: But if the containment were intact or patched or whatever, there d be a much less significant concern with, you know, with the water issues, right, but effectively the containments are not intact. Tony Pietrangelo: They ve been breached. Bill Freebairn: And is there any indication of they talked early on about an effort to seal-up containment. Tony Pietrangelo: Yes, yes. Bill Freebairn: So have you heard anything about that? Tony Pietrangelo: Not only what was then published in the press with regard to trying to isolate the turbine building where they think a lot of the groundwater is migrating in. It s still unclear the path between the containment building and the turbine building that gets the water there and I don t think they shed any light on that either while we were there. Joe Pollock: Right now the turbine building is still filled with water from the accident. So is the reactor building. The groundwater s leaking into it so they re forced to process the groundwater that leaks into it and the water they re using for cooling and they re putting that in tanks right now. They have to get to the point where they can start processing water and release it to be able to pump down the turbine building which is some pretty contaminated water so that then they could 6
start making an entryway to figure out where the water s coming from reactor to the turbine building and figure out where the seal-up would take place. They re optimistically end of next year before they would have a handle on processing and releasing water to sufficient quantity that they could actually get ahead on it instead of building tanks to store it right and I believe that s what they committed to the prime minister a week or two ago that by the end of 2014 it would be have the water situation in hand. That s dependent on their cleanup systems that they have The three-train unit. Two of the trains have been down. They just started the third train up last week and they had to bring that back down over the weekend for a mindless problem so that gets up and running to sufficient, then in the end they ll have clean water with some radionuclide that they ll be looking to be able to release. John Keeley: Tony, did you want to offer any reflections on what we ve heard from the executives relative to INPO and its relationship here in the U.S. from JNSI and how they were trying to model that, kind of reflections and things that they heard? Tony Pietrangelo: Yes, I mean, the strength of INPO is that the chief executive officer participation in it, PSPers rely heavily on the evaluation process that INPO uses then hold each other accountable at the CEO level to any degradation in performance. That has not been practiced in Japan. That s really the cultural thing that that s why I think it remains to be seen whether they can implement that model in Japan in that culture that we use here but that s their intent. John Keeley: Mike, we ll give another crack to anybody on the line wants to have a crack at Tony if they want. Operator: And as a reminder, it is star and 1 to register to ask a question. We ll pause another moment to allow any questions to queue. And I m showing no questions at this time. John Keeley: Mike, do you have any questions for Tony? Operator: Not at this time, sir. John Keeley: All right, well we have a sandwich for you if you want. Anybody up front want to offer concluding remarks before we call it a day? Anything else from the visit? Tony Pietrangelo: I think we are trying to continue the dialogue with our Japanese counterparts. This is very much viewed as a first step in establishing that relationship. It was historic in getting those CNOs together with our CNOs. I believe they are as a group going to come to the United States next year. I think the timing of that s being worked out now and they ll visit a U.S. facility as well as part of that trip, so. You know, the other piece of this is that the way we got better as an industry really starting after TMI (Three Mile Island) was to learn from our operating experience and apply that going forward such that we don t make the same mistakes that led to events before. And I think they get that piece of it there now that you can t operate in a vacuum, that you pay attention not only to what happens in your own country with operating experience but you look globally at it and we ve been trying to learn through operating experience and benchmarking of our international counterparts because good ideas can come from anywhere. 7
And I think that s how we ve gotten our industry up to, you know, 90 percent capacity factors and the safety record we have and I think they re trying to very much emulate that now and we re going to help them. So if we can learn from them both on the operating practice side as well as on the construction side, you know, we are attempting to build new units in South Carolina and Georgia and the Japanese have been able to construct their new facilities in 36 to 42 months. We take that right now at Vogtle and Summer so, you know, that sharing information is always good and that s what makes our industry unique is that we don t compete with each other. We share our experiences with each other and again that s how we get better at this tough, tough industry so with that... John Keeley: All right. One last crack, any follow-up questions? Bill Freebairn: Yes, there was one thing that I meant to ask which was after the visit, is there any aspect of the U.S. regulatory response that you think is not necessary or that maybe is you would change or revise a little bit in terms not just of the like response what you say you felt was validated by the visit but other requirements that are being imposed on the industry which are quite costly. Tony Pietrangelo: Yes, I think we were in good alignment with the NRC on the Tier 1 requirements. We re moving forward with the implementation of all of those and we ve done most of the Tier 2 near-term task force report recommendations as part of our Tier 1 activities. The Tier 3 are the ones that require more research and now those remain to be seen but we feel very good about how we re getting through the implementation of the Tier 1 and Tier 2 requirements. You know, it s a big project for our sites. There s a lot of coordinating that has to be done. That s what Joe and Steve are working on every day with our members. That s why we re having monthly steering committee meetings with the NRC so we re working on... Bill Freebairn: Maybe then next week. Tony Pietrangelo:...maybe not next week but we re working our way through it and again they know that, you know, this is what we re trying to answer the bow in response to Fukushima and do what we said we were going to do and so we re still I think on a really good path towards that. So no was the answer to that. Bill Freebairn: Right, and Joe what s your title, name? Joe Pollock: It s Joe Pollock, P-O-L-L-O-C-K. I m the Vice President of Nuclear Operations. John Keeley: All right, again, Mike on this end we are ready to wrap things up and I ll just remind the listeners on the phone of the availability of a replay, oral replay of this call by day s end or tomorrow morning at the latest as well as a transcript and again my contact information jmk@nei.org and phone 202.739.8020. I appreciate your participation and I m anxious to help out if I can additionally and we look forward to having you again for our next event when that comes. Thank you. Operator: And thank you for joining us today ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today s program. You may disconnect at any time. END 8