NEI Nuclear Notes

David Heacock This week is the fifth anniversary of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant . To mark the event, we'll be sharing observations from leaders around the nuclear energy industry all week long on how the U.S. has absorbed lessons learned from the accident to make safe nuclear plants even safer . Today's contribution comes on the industry's FLEX strategy from David Heacock , President and Chief Executive Officer of Dominion Nuclear. The U.S. nuclear industry is well on its way toward implementing a flexible mitigation approach for responding to any event that may exceed the robust design of the nation’s nuclear power plants. This FLEX strategy , the outcome of the U.S. industry’s response to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan, provides yet another layer of safety. This is in addition to the multiple back-up safety systems already available to protect the public and environment. In effect, this strategy was demonstrated to succes...

Charles Casto The latest addition to our understanding of the lessons in leadership from the Fukushima experience of 2011 comes from Charles Casto .  Mr. Casto spent almost a year as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's senior liaison in Japan after the Fukushima accident.  This role gave him an extraordinary opportunity to learn from the people involved in the accident response.  Mr. Casto recounts many of his insights in an article in the Harvard Business Review, July-August 2014 issue, and in an HBR podcast accompanying the article.  Naohiro Masuda The article focuses on the crisis leadership of  Naohiro Masuda , superintendent of the Fukushima Daini site, and his contribution to saving Daini from the reactor meltdowns that occurred at the sister plant, Fukushima Daiichi .  Mr. Casto and co-authors Ranjay Gulati and Charlotte Krontiris, highlight Masuda-san's technique for "sense-making" in the midst of uncertai...

While the U.S.-Japan CNO Summit has ended and the American delegation has returned home, we're still seeing reports come in from their time in Japan. The latest is this video diary from Peter Sena, President and Chief Nuclear Officer of First Energy . In this video vignette, Sena reflect on the lessons he learned after visiting Fukushima Daiichi and meeting face to face with TEPCO employees who are working to clean up the site: As always, please keep up to date with the latest content by following #CNOSummit on Twitter.

Maria Korsnick Constellation Energy Chief Nuclear Officer Maria Korsnick was in Japan last week touring the country’s nuclear facilities with a prominent group of U.S. chief nuclear officers.  This is the second in a series of travel logs that Maria recorded. You can read an earlier diary entry from Maria, here . Additional coverage of the CNO Summit is on Twitter at #CNOSummit . Earlier this week I toured Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini. The stations are only 7.5 miles apart but the contrast is remarkable. When approaching Daiichi, we were stopped at a village 12 miles from the station. The area was previously used as a training facility for Japan's soccer team, but today it serves as temporary housing for site workers and a plant access checkpoint. Each of us received a whole body count before boarding a bus to Daiichi. The view from the bus window will stay with me forever. It looked like a war zone. The earthquake and the force of the tsunami were evident ever...

Ed Halpin, SVP & CNO of PG&E Ed Halpin, Senior Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer at PG&E , was in Japan this week with virtually all of his American colleagues as part of the U.S.-Japan CNO Summit. He shared this diary entry with us after reflecting on what he saw at Fukushima Daiichi earlier this week. Be sure to follow all the updates from Japan on Twitter using the #CNOSummit hash tag. As nuclear operators, we have earned a special trust from the communities we serve. My time here reaffirms my belief that the U.S. nuclear industry must always maintain its strong focus on safe operations, intensive training programs, effective peer-review processes, and the continued sharing of lessons-learned across the nation and throughout the world. The U.S. industry has always relied on redundant layers of safety in operating its facilities and is making exceptional gains in implementing a program known as " FLEX " to further enhance safety in the face of ex...

Editor's Note: For the past week, NEI's John Keeley has been accompanying a delegation of American chief nuclear officers on a tour of Japan. This is his last blog entry he'll make before returning home to the U.S.  To find all of the content related to this week's trip from NEI Nuclear Notes, click here . And for all of the chatter about the trip on Twitter, check out the #CNOSummit hash tag. Thanks to John for a job well done.  (Tokyo, September 13) I won't miss jet-lag-induced risings at 3 a.m.each and every day -- and apparently I was joined in those by each and every American chief nuclear officer and communicator -- but just about everything else on this trip created a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. So I thought I'd share those moments that stood out most to me:  At every formal engagement between U.S. and Japanese nuclear officers this week our hosts started the proceedings with a formal apology "for the concern and difficulty and conf...

At one point Wednesday, while within a few hundred yards of the three melted down reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, I was outfitted in three layers of gloves (two rubber, one cotton), plastic covers over my shoes, a very hot and very insulating Tyvek jumpsuit, and a respirator mask. The interior of our tour bus was fantastically shielded in plastic, and when, while maneuvering on a road between the ocean that sent the monstrous March 2011 tsunami and Daiichi's turbine buildings, our driver dramatically increased our speed as we arrived in front of unit 3, where the dose rate was highest on the site, to limit our exposure. Storefront in an abandoned village. All week the chief nuclear officers on this trip have regularly referenced their collective need to experience, first-hand, conditions in Japan that all but only a few have only read about. Our bus' movements, and our in-person engagements with shift managers and control room operators on duty the afternoon of March 11, ...

The past two days in Japan, U.S. chief nuclear officers have toured Fukushima Daini and Daiichi, and with respect to the latter, left the experience appreciably changed. We've made a point each day of inviting the CNOs to the very back of our tour bus and asking them to share their experiences on camera with us. It's true that every CNO we spoke with identified the Daiichi visit as life-altering, but no reaction seemed better representative of the CNOs than that of Jeff Forbes , Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer for Entergy Nuclear . Just watch. Please remember to follow our updates on Twitter using the #CNOSummit hash tag.

Maria Korsnick Maria Korsnick is Chief Nuclear Offiicer (CNO) of Constellation Energy . In the aftermath of Fukushima, Maria appeared in a series of videos for NEI explaining exactly what changes the industry was effecting in the wake of Fukushima .  She's in Japan this week as part of a delegation of American CNOs touring the country’s nuclear facilities as part of the U.S.-Japan CNO Summit. This is the first in a series of travel logs that Maria recorded to share her experiences. Please remember to follow our updates on Twitter using the #CNOSummit hash tag. As I boarded the plane for Japan, I wondered what it was going to be like to experience our business in a completely different culture. Once I arrived, it didn’t take long to generate some first impressions. My hosts were welcoming and polite, surroundings were neat and orderly and properties were well-cared for. It’s abundantly clear that the Japanese people take pride in their surroundings. Japan has only one-thi...

The following post was sent to us via email by John Keeley, who is travelling with a delegation of American chief nuclear officers in Japan this week. You can follow John's observations on Twitter by following @nei_media and the #CNOSummit hash tag. In summer, in morning or early afternoon, when a traveler moves by air many thousands of miles from east to west, he never quite escapes the bright sun of day. My communicator colleagues here in Japan all noted the difficulty we had securing substantive rest on our flights over the Pacific during this novel journey. We were ever chasing the sun, they said. The American chief nuclear officers we're following with our cameras and electronica this week have been, ever since their arrival here, in perpetual motion in pursuit of safety lessons. In making the unprecedented and extraordinary commitment to "put eyes on the problem" created by the 3/11 Fukushima tragedy, our CNOs, it occurs to me, are following a global commit...

Following on John Keeley's message from earlier this morning , here's the first video message we've received out of Japan regarding the #CNOSummit that's taking place there this week. It's from Randy Edington, Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer of Arizona Public Service . Though the video is intended for Randy's team back in Arizona, we think the message about the trip is universal: Look for more content from the #CNOSummit all week both here at NEI Nuclear Notes and on Twitter.

Often, I travel most modestly on behalf of the U.S. nuclear industry -- like say up and back to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for public meetings, some 7 miles from NEI's offices in Northwest Washington. But about a month ago, as word began circulating in the office about a sizable contingent (almost all) of our nation's chief nuclear officers traveling to Japan to meet with their Japanese CNO counterparts, NEI communications leadership saw a clear role to try and capture the historic visit in words and images. And tweets, of course. My bosses picked me to tag along with the CNOs (almost 30 of them), as a bit of an embedded reporter. I've a daunting task in that regard.  To be sure, this is a historic visit; nothing of its kind has been undertaken before in the history of commercial nuclear operations in the U.S. For the first time, the chief nuclear officers from the U.S. and Japan will meet together to discuss lessons learned from a severe accident: specifically,...

Earlier this week, a Japanese government official said that there were no plans to restart any of the reactors at the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant. Fukushima Daini was a textbook example of how things can go right at a nuclear power plant in the face of an extreme event, something we noted at our SafetyFirst microsite in December : When the earthquake struck, the Fukushima Daini facility automatically shut down safely as designed. However, it went into a state of emergency following the tsunami when water damage disrupted heat removal systems in three of the four reactors. TEPCO reactor operators were able to quickly bring reactor 3, which had retained its heat removal function, into stable condition in a matter of hours. Meanwhile, other employees worked feverishly around-the-clock to reestablish heat removal capability in the other three reactors and finished stabilizing them by March 15. A key distinction between the post-disaster conditions at Fukushima Daini and Fukushima ...