 Good morning. Thank you, Eric, for that very kind introduction. I want to welcome all of you who have traveled so very far. I see some of you sitting right there from around the world to join us today and this week for the Regulatory Information Conference. And I would also like to add my welcome to those of you from industry, from public interest groups, from the public, and of course, from the NRC. And I would also like to add my thanks to those of Eric to the staff who work tirelessly to bring off the RIC every year. They start planning the day the RIC ends for the next year. So it's quite an undertaking and it's a fabulous conference. I hope you all get to take full advantage of it. Eric did explain a lot about what was going on this week and I think it's going to be fantastic. So welcome. I want to reflect on what today is. Today is March 11, 2014. It is to the day, the third anniversary of the great Tohoku earthquake, which was the initiating event of the Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan. The Tohoku earthquake, as you can see from the image, was located 178 kilometers to the northeast of the Fukushima Daiichi site. It was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and it resulted in significant damage on land. For the Fukushima Daiichi site, it resulted in loss of offsite power. But worse, 50 minutes later, it resulted in a massive tsunami, which not only affected the plant but affected the east coast of Japan and was terribly devastating. It wiped out entire coastal villages. More than 18,000 people lost their lives in this event. Terribly devastating. But relevant to us in the nuclear business, it affected greatly the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was hit by a 45-foot wall of water. And this wall of water swamped the diesel generators, which were providing the backup power after the loss of the offsite power. And we know the result now. Three reactors melted down for hydrogen explosions and a continuing effort to now clean up the site which will continue for years. And it's an amazing effort. I had an opportunity to visit with my Japanese colleagues yesterday and hear what they're doing at the site. They're doing an amazing amount of work. Relevant for us in the US as regulators, we drew a lot of lessons from this accident, from this operating experience. And we've required a number of safety enhancements as a result. Right after the accident, the NRC put together a near-term task force, which produced, within three short months, an excellent report outlining 12 activities that we should consider, the Commission should consider in strengthening safety at nuclear power plants. The Commission did consider this, and they prioritized those activities into three tiers and we have been making significant progress working with industry on dealing with these changes at plants. Let me just highlight for you some of the more safety significant ones. The mitigating strategies order that was issued by the Commission in 2012, which required plants to last indefinitely in the event of a loss of offsite power. And plants have been actively purchasing equipment, additional diesel generators, additional pumps, piping, wiring, distributing around the site so that something will be available in the event of a disaster. In addition, the industry has developed offsite centers that can bring equipment in. So there has been a lot of activity in response to Fukushima. And this year, we will see significant activity at nuclear power plants during the refueling outages as they prepare to meet the 2016 deadline for a number of these orders. I'm not going to belabor them anymore, and I'll leave it to our EDO to discuss other issues in particular. But let me say that the US, of course, was not the only regulator that had a response like this to Fukushima. Our sister and brother regulators around the world had similar responses, and have proposed similar changes in our instituting similar changes at their reactors in their countries. We at the NRC got some good feedback on what we've done very recently. Just this last month in February, we had an integrated regulatory review service mission follow-up, which looked at our Fukushima activities and noted that the report by the near-term task force was a source of inspiration for many regulatory bodies worldwide. And we didn't do this alone. We also brought our activities to the public at the NRC. We've held almost 200 public meetings on Fukushima activities alone, and we will continue to have these meetings as we work through more of the changes that we are considering. So this has been a big activity for us, a big response. But let's not forget that as a result of the accident, public confidence was shaken, sometimes significantly, in some places significantly. Japan, certainly, public confidence was deeply affected. And you see the public in Japan buying Geiger counters so that they can themselves check radiation levels around their homes and communities. You also immediately in the aftermath of the accident saw a lot of headlines illustrated here that sometimes had misleading stories attached to them because there was a dearth of information associated with what occurred during the accident. And one knows the adage that nature abhors a vacuum. And certainly in the case of Fukushima or any kind of nuclear incident, when there isn't information, people will fill it in. And sometimes that information may be incorrect, it may be misleading, it may be deliberately misleading. In the US, we've experienced this ourselves. Most recently, I recall a YouTube video of a man in California holding a Geiger counter on a beach with seeing very high readings. The implication was that radioactivity from Fukushima traveled across the Pacific Ocean and had already landed on the beaches of California in very high activity levels. Simply not correct, we know from measurements that there is radioactive plume coming across the Pacific Ocean. It has not arrived yet on the West Coast and it is not significantly high. We know from models of this plume that at worst, the radioactive levels in the water that will arrive will be 100 times lower than the drinking water standard in the US, the Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standard. So even if you could drink seawater, you would be able to because it would be significantly below the standard. Nonetheless, in the absence of good information on this, one fills in. And we need to be cognizant of this in the industry to make sure that we get accurate information and credible information out and available. And this idea of credible information is a theme that I'm going to carry through my discussion today because I think it is imperative that we, as regulators, find and seek out that credible information. So in the face of the Fukushima accident, we need to remain vigilant. We need to be prepared for the unknown. We face an uncertain future, especially in the US. Right now, we are experiencing both reactor decommissioning and reactor construction. I'll talk more about that a little later. But we need to ensure safety and security, and that will give us the best opportunity to succeed as regulators. So how do we operationalize this vigilance? 10 years ago, actually, Commissioner Ed McGaffigan stood on this stage and asked some very important questions, I believe. And this was as a result of what happened at the Davis-Bessie plant where the pressure vessel had developed a hole. He asked, what do others know that we don't know? And how could we not have seen this coming? And I think those questions are just as relevant today as they were 10 years ago. We need to pay close attention to that. We need to be asking what others know that we don't know. We need to continuously learn. We need to ask and look outside of ourselves as our own regulatory body. We need to ask what other federal agencies are doing, what other industries are doing, what our own industry knows. We need to hear from the public. We need to see what information they may have. We need to ask what other countries are doing because they're dealing with many of the same situations that we are. We need to ask what the latest academic research is telling us. We need to engender a healthy debate on a lot of these issues. And by the way, science only advances with debate. Debate is essential and it is important. And we need to make sure that as regulators, we have the best information available so that we can most effectively accomplish our mission of ensuring public health and safety. So let me spend some time focusing on what I'm calling continuous learning. And I'm going to give you some specific examples of how I think we can do this. Let me first focus internally within the NRC and then I'll focus externally. So internally, we have within the NRC a wealth of knowledge. We have a brain trust. We need to exploit it, okay? And I'm going to give you an example of how we can do that by looking at a field that's near and dear to me, the Earth Sciences, okay? So let me explain some of the insights from the Earth Sciences and that our Earth Sciences can provide to us. So Earth Science tells us a few things. It tells us that we need to expect change. The Earth is dynamic. It tells us that we need to reconsider what we've defined as normal and maybe not rely on historical data alone. And it tells us that we need to recognize that the field is still young and it's still learning. So let me explain all of those in a little more detail. So we need to expect change. As I said, Earth systems are dynamic and complex. We face a situation now on the planet of climate change and climate change means that we will be expecting more floods or droughts. We may expect a polar vortex although I'm told this polar vortex cannot be tied directly to climate change. And we're going to experience it again on Thursday, by the way, be prepared. We need to expect warmer waters that will affect both the intake and outtake for nuclear power plants. We need to be expecting all of this and at the NRC we are. Eric assures me that we are doing this kind of work and we need to continue to do it. We need to continue to keep up with the latest models and latest predictions so that we're prepared to deal with the future. Let me turn to defining or redefining what normal is. We have relatively short lifetimes compared to the age of the Earth as human beings. And so it's natural for us to rely on our own personal experience or historical data. And by historical data I mean data that we've collected over the last 100 years or so. So for instance there's amount precipitation data has been collected for about 60 years. And we're using that precipitation data from that 60 year period to define the boundaries of what we might expect in the future. As an Earth scientist I would argue that this is not adequate. We need to look beyond historical data because the Earth processes occur over much longer time periods and we need to consider what might happen over those longer time periods. We need to recalibrate. So let me use an example to explain this to you. And I'm going to use an example of volcanism, volcanoes. You might be, you might recall, most of you might recall, the Mount St. Helens eruption 32 or 33 years ago in Washington State. That eruption produced one cubic kilometer of material illustrated by my little pointers, not quite adequate here, by that tiny little green square in the figure. Okay? Now the largest volcanic eruption in history was the Tambora eruption. 200 years ago in Indonesia it produced 160 cubic kilometers of material, significantly more. But is that the upper end of what we should expect? No, no absolutely not. We look in the geologic record. We see two million years ago in the Yellowstone area an eruption produced 2,500 cubic kilometers of material. And you can see the aerial distribution of that eruption on the map, whoops, compared with the distribution in green of Mount St. Helens material. And you can see from this figure that there were even larger eruptions that produced even more material. So we need to recalibrate what we think normal is and what we understand normal to be. And we will continually do this as we learn more about the earth. This is significant in terms of that magnitude 9 earthquake outside Japan. Was it an extreme event or was it a normal event? Let me also say that the earth sciences is continually learning, progressing, evolving as a science. In 2004, when the Sumatra quake happened, it was a massive wake-up call to seismologists because prior to that period, prior to 2004, seismologists believed that only certain subduction zones pictured here where one plate, one lithospheric plate is being dragged beneath another, that only certain subduction zones could produce mega quakes, that produce magnitudes of greater than 8.8. Now, after that Sumatra earthquake, which was a mega quake, that produced that massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed 200,000 people, after that quake, seismologists started publishing papers saying, we need to rethink. It turns out that it looks like any subduction zone of sufficient length can produce a mega quake. And most unfortunately, in 2011, on March 11th, this was proven true with Fukushima. So the point is that the earth sciences is constantly evolving. We're learning about new processes. We're refining our understanding all the time. And by the way, as a reminder, the paradigm that underlies the earth sciences, plate tectonics, the idea that the earth's crust is made up of a number of lithospheric plates that move past each other, that paradigm is as old as the NRC. It was accepted by the earth science community in the early 1970s. So it's a young science. So there's a lot of learning we can do from the earth sciences and internally. I'm gonna keep up with myself here. But I also wanna focus externally. After Fukushima happened, experts from outside the industry asked a lot of relevant and important questions, questions we asked ourselves, questions like, can sites respond to prolonged station blackout? Are we doing enough to address multi-unit accidents? Are spent fuel pools vulnerable? And how reliable are historical data? And the actions that we've taken at the NRC address specifically these questions. But it's important for us to continue to search for, search out and accept information from outside our agency as well. So let me give you some examples of that. Of course, I think many of those at the NRC are quite familiar that we learn from the nuclear industry and it's a mutual process. After Fukushima happened, this near-term task force report came out and it suggested that the agency issue an order to require plants to mitigate or survive the loss of offsite power indefinitely. And in developing that order, the industry responded and said, look, this is how you should think about the guidance. You should think about how to implement this and we think, the industry said, we think that you should include portable and offsite equipment in that guidance. And we did so and that's how we're moving forward. These facilities are being developed and the industry is moving forward with that. We need to hear from those we regulate, those who implement our regulations so that the regulations that we mandate are actually doable. So that's very important for us to continue that conversation with industry. But we also need to learn from other industries. We're not the only ones who deal with concrete, for example, and there have been problems with concrete. There have been problems with concrete in the construction of new power plants in Finland and France. There was most recently a problem with concrete at the Davis-Bessie facility in the US. But our industry isn't the only one that has problems with concrete. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the big dig in Boston. I live through the entire thing. So I'm quite familiar with it, but there were a lot of problems with concrete in the big dig and there was, and pictured here is the problem where the adhesive with the concrete did not work and actually killed the person across a car. Most recently, the Wannapum Dam in Washington State has discovered a 65-foot crack in their concrete dam. We need to be working with other industries and learning from them, and I'm sure they can learn from us as well. So that's another place we need to learn. We also need to learn from the public. After Fukushima, the public asked a number of relevant questions. They asked, can this happen here? And will the accident in Fukushima affect me? These are important questions that we need to be able to answer. But we can actually also learn from the public because they have knowledge that we don't have. And let me give you a couple examples. After the Chernobyl accident, the fallout cloud traveled over Europe, it traveled west over Europe. And there was no precipitation until that fallout cloud arrived in Northern England. And then there was heavy precipitation. So Northern England was affected by the fallout from the Chernobyl accident. And initially, the UK government did some calculations on the effect of the cesium in that area, and they did it by averaging the amounts, and they said it won't be so bad. Don't worry. There are a lot of sheep farmers in the area, and the sheep farmers were worried that the sheep would eat the grass and be affected. When the government said this, the sheep farmers said, well, wait a minute. You know, as you can see from the picture, the land here is not flat. It's very undulating. And we know that in heavy rainfall events, the rain washes down to certain areas and it collects, and we're afraid of hotspots. And in fact, the sheep farmers were proved right. There were many hotspots in the area, and to this day, sheep farmers in that area are affected by the fallout from Chernobyl. Another example, closer to home for those of us in the US. The Livermore National Lab in the late 1980s was trying to deal with its waste products, its hazardous and radioactive waste products. Idaho was giving it trouble saying, we don't want your waste. And so they decided they would build an incinerator and incinerate the waste. And to do this, they had to do an environmental impact statement. They did their environmental impact statement. And there were folks in the community who were not very comfortable with the idea of an incinerator in particular anti-nuclear group. This anti-nuclear group teamed up with a retired lab scientist who actually went very carefully through the environmental impact statement and found that the calculations in the environmental impact statement were done incorrectly and significantly underestimated the potential plutonium emissions from the incinerator and caused the lab to redo that environmental impact statement. So again, members of the public have knowledge that's relevant and we need to be mindful of that. We can learn from them too. But of course, we can also learn from our international colleagues. We learn from other countries and we do this a lot at the NRC. We have both cooperative and assistance programs and in our cooperative programs, we do a lot of sharing of information. We share operating experience. We exchange staff. In fact, yesterday I met one of the Japanese staff who's going to come and spend some time in our agency. We have learned a lot from our Chinese colleagues on construction of the AP-1000. And that's been very helpful to us. And we've shared a lot with our colleagues around the world on post-Fukushima activities and we've learned from them on that. And we need to continue to learn from other countries. They've dealt with the same issues that we are dealing with. We do not need to recreate the wheel that's been invented, let's find it and use it. As I said, we also have assistance programs at the NRC where we work with other countries, whether they have nuclear power plants or simply nuclear materials, we work with them on safety and security issues. And we promote effective regulation and let me just jump ahead and explain what I mean by effective regulation. Effective regulation requires a regulator who is independent, who is free of undue influence, either political or industrial. The regulator has to be well-funded and they have to be adequately staffed with competent staff that have the expertise necessary to serve them. They also should behave in an open and transparent manner. They should behave transparently by making their decision-making public so the public can understand how they've come to their decisions but they should also behave openly, meeting with the wide variety of public industry, government officials who are interested in their work and taking account of the feedback from these folks. And of course, they need support from the highest levels of government. So let me go back briefly and say that in this case of countries that are considering nuclear power, it's very important in my view to have indigenous regulatory capability. Absolutely essential. That's how you protect your country. You need to have that ability. And especially for those countries considering a build-on-operate model, I think it's important to keep in mind that regulation from afar, it would be challenging for any regulator to regulate from afar. Something to keep in mind. In terms of peer-to-peer country information and expertise, I will be going less than two weeks to attend the Convention on Nuclear Safety. It's the triennial review meeting of the convention. Whoops. And in Vienna, Austria, this is an opportunity for peer review of our nuclear programs to see if member states are meeting their obligations under the convention. And this will be the first time that we will be evaluating each other's reactions and activities in response to Fukushima. So this will be another opportunity for peer-to-peer learning internationally. So let me begin to close by saying that I think it's essential that we have a full scope of information available to us before we make decisions. This will inform our decisions. It will help us make the best possible decisions and results in enhanced public confidence as a result. Our commitment to continuous learning, therefore, is critical. And I think it's more important than ever for us at the NRC as we face changing circumstances. And let me focus a little bit on those changing circumstances now. We're facing what I call a dynamic environment in the United States. As I mentioned, we have five nuclear power plants that announced or have shut down or announced a shutdown in the last year. We have five nuclear reactors that are under construction. We are continuing to implement the post-Fukushima lessons learned. We have a lot going on. We are also operating under challenging financial circumstances. Last year, we experienced a difficult situation financially. So what actions will we take in response? Well, first of all, of course, we will always maintain our commitment to our core mission of ensuring public health and safety. The agency under the leadership of our Executive Director of Operations, Mark Satorius, is undertaking a five-year review, which will take into consideration the resources that we have, the organization that we're doing, and align our mission responsibilities with our organization and our resources. And I commend Mark for this effort and offer my help such as it is to go forward with that. I think we need to be flexible and efficient and we need to get things right the first time. So if that means we need to pause, take a breath and think carefully through a change before we make it, so be it. But we should get it right the first time instead of trying to have to fix it later on. We need to ensure that the safety enhancements that we put in place as a result of the Fukushima Accident are sustainable over the long term. And of course, in my view, I think it's essential that we continue to work hard on improving our public engagement. So let me say that we are fully committed to protecting the public's health and safety at the NRC and continuing our commitment to expand our knowledge and our engagement is essential in ensuring our success in the changing environment that we face at the NRC. Let me close with taking us back to the anniversary of Fukushima today, the 11th of March. And as we reflect on that, I wanna share with you a Japanese proverb, fall down seven times, stand up eight. And in that spirit, I wanna commend our Japanese colleagues and the Japanese people for their courage, for their resilience, for their commitment to strengthening nuclear safety both within Japan and worldwide and for their willingness to share what they've learned with us. And with that, I thank you very much.